“Kepler did not wish to separate his science from his metaphysics or his metaphysics from his mysticism,” writes Connor, who...
The kitchen details and cosmological consequences of Johannes Kepler’s life in a turbulent time.
Connor (English/Kean University) brings readers back to the events that simmered and raged around the astronomer, “a committed Lutheran staring the modern age in the eye” who became the father of celestial mechanics, formulator of the laws of planetary motion, and a pioneer in modern optics. A former Jesuit who has written about spirituality (Silent Fire, not reviewed), the author admirably sets Kepler (1571–1630) within the important context of his faith, showing how he brought it to bear on his scientific work by finding “God in the hidden mathematical harmonies of the universe in as deep a way as he found God in the revelation of the Scripture.” Understanding nature informed the understanding of God, revelation and salvation were in the stars, and his belief in those hidden harmonies gave the astronomer moral courage to buck the authorities of the Lutheran church as well as the onslaughts of the Counter-Reformation. Kepler lived during a time of dark change: war, peasant revolts, and religious ferment among Christian denominations. “Mystery tolled like a bell in people's lives . . . in fear of unseen forces and anything beyond their understanding.” The distinctions dividing scientists from alchemists were not so clear, and astronomy was the unruly daughter of astrology. (Kepler practiced both.) His biographer depicts him brilliantly making use of Tycho Brahe's observations and grasping the movement of the stars while suffering excommunication from his own church, the deaths of his children, and allegations of witchcraft against his mother.
“Kepler did not wish to separate his science from his metaphysics or his metaphysics from his mysticism,” writes Connor, who gives us a healthy, purposeful, and illuminating dose of each.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-052255-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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
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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
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