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
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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