Dirty politics via committee? Newton truly was a modern. Though light on equations and proofs, Christianson offers a...
Slender but detailed life of the famed scientist and inventor.
Isaac Newton was fortunate enough to have traded up at birth: his small-landholding father died and his mother married a rich man and insisted that her son be given a trust fund, allowing him to live comfortably—if at a distance, since the price of having that fund meant living with his grandparents. Thus spurned, Newton plotted revenge, for, as Christianson (The Last Posse, 2001, etc.) writes, he could carry a grudge forever. Small and weak, Newton was still a scrapper, unafraid of a fight; but when he wasn’t scrumming, he was under a tree or a hedge with some difficult book, and when he arrived at Cambridge, in 1661, he was primed to do great things. He was soon a fellow and master, and before he was 24, he “had become the most advanced mathematician the world had yet known” by developing fluxions, or what is now called the calculus, by which a scientist could describe quantities that are constantly changing. While doing so, Newton had also been keeping careful notes on gravitation—inspired, as the old story goes, by the falling of an apple—and on the nature of the solar system, all of which would yield publications that would cinch Newton’s fame. For all his renown, Newton was ready to rumble, as when he accused a young German named Gottfried Leibniz of plagiarism and entangled himself in an unseemly feud with fellow astronomer John Flamsteed. In both instances, Christianson shows, Newton played Nixonian tricks to make sure he won out: In the first case, he called together a high-powered committee to review his charge that Leibniz had stolen the calculus from him, but “handpicked every committee member, stacking the deck against the faraway Leibniz from the beginning.”
Dirty politics via committee? Newton truly was a modern. Though light on equations and proofs, Christianson offers a revealing portrait of a man who helped revolutionize science.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-19-530070-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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