If the life of the American-born scientist Count Rumford had been created in a novel, nobody would believe it. This new biography chronicles all his achievements and escapades. Born near Boston in 1753, Benjamin Thompson showed an early aptitude for scientific subjects and a passion for rigor and organization. At 19, working as a schoolmaster, he married a rich widow who introduced him into society. As Brown (The Big Bang: A History of Explosives, not reviewed) makes clear, Thompson assiduously cultivated his newly forged connections with Royalist authorities. Spying for the British when the Revolution broke out, he fled to England, without his wife and two-year-old daughter, in 1776—never to return. His political connections got him a commission as a full colonel and a knighthood, and his scientific investigations of gunnery won him election to the Royal Society. Then he headed to Bavaria, where he almost instantly won high office, reforming the military and instituting workhouses for the poor—the entire time, apparently, spying for England. Promoted to count, he took the name Rumford, after the New Hampshire town where he had abandoned his wife. As a scientist, he took a particular interest in heat; his experiments not only helped establish the kinetic theory of heat, but led him to develop significant improvements in domestic heating, lighting, and cookery. His discoveries also prompted him to don white clothing in winter, as the best means for preserving body heat—a choice that marked him as eccentric. Back in England, he helped establish the British Institute, a major force for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, he accumulated a string of mistresses, including the widow of the French chemist Lavoisier, whom he married in 1805. He lived out his final days in Paris, an eccentric to the end. Brown’s telling of Rumford’s tale is somewhat pedestrian, but the mere facts are enough to make this a page-turner. (8 pages b&w illus.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7509-2184-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
