Repcheck emphasizes that Copernicus was one of the first thinkers who looked at the world without preconceptions and set...
A fine biography of the obscure cleric who demonstrated that the earth was not the center of the universe.
Copernicus (1473–1543) led a humdrum life, but science writer Repcheck (The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of Earth’s Antiquity, 2003) does an exceptional job bringing to life his character, his era and the astronomical problem he solved. Aristotle’s notion that heavenly bodies orbited the earth in perfect circles seemed reasonable to everyone except astronomers, whose calculations didn’t work if they assumed he was right. Two centuries later, Ptolemy described a universe in which the earth sat slightly off-center and heavenly bodies orbited in one perfect circle inside a second perfect circle at varying speeds. Although absurdly complicated, this model enabled astronomers to calculate with reasonable accuracy; 1,500 years later, it was still in use. Born into a family of prosperous Germans who settled in Poland, Copernicus passed a leisurely youth, spending 12 years at four separate universities. He finally received a doctorate from the University of Ferrara in 1503. Despite his fascination with astronomy, he took the customary degree in canon law and returned to his local diocese in Poland, where he remained until his death 40 years later, observing the sky in his spare time. His On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, packed with equations and diagrams, was incomprehensible except to astronomers, who appreciated the mathematics that improved their predictions of eclipses, solstices and planetary movements. Upon its publication in 1543, few paid attention to its heretical picture of a universe in which the earth circles the sun. Only after the flamboyant Galileo began spreading the news some 70 years later did the Catholic Church add the book to its Index in 1616.
Repcheck emphasizes that Copernicus was one of the first thinkers who looked at the world without preconceptions and set down what he observed. He deserves his place among the founders of modern science, and this lively, lucid account does him justice.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8951-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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