Culturally blinkered but refreshingly opinionated and not without a few pleasant surprises.
A lively parade of cranks, mystics, rebels, obsessives, and geniuses, humble or otherwise, whose discoveries and insights shaped today’s science and technology.
Grant’s choices for inclusion are, unsurprisingly, nearly all male, dead, and white. Moving chronologically, he begins with “semi-legendary Mediterranean mystic” Pythagoras and ends with climate-change activist James Hansen. In between he trots out luminaries from Hypatia (murdered by a Christian patriarch’s “Rent-a-Mob”) to the “totally unscrupulous toad” Francis Bacon, from James Clerk Maxwell, the “Scottish Einstein,” to Einstein himself. Nine women make the cut, but only Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar represent the world beyond Europe and North America. Still, Howard Florey, who actually found ways to produce the antibiotic that Alexander Fleming only happened to notice, isn’t the only figure here who’s not one of the usual suspects. Moreover, conventional as his selections are, the author realizes them with vivacity, lucidly describing their significant achievements and also drawing connections—between the ideas of Leibnitz in the 17th century and of visionary mathematician Riemann in the 19th to Einstein’s in the 20th, for instance. Each entry includes an old or photographic portrait and an afterword with leads to more information, plus references to novels, films, lunar craters, rock bands, and other pop-culture links.
Culturally blinkered but refreshingly opinionated and not without a few pleasant surprises. (index) (Collective biography. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942186-17-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Zest Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
In either iteration, a provocative counter to conventional, blinkered views of our national story.
A classic framing of this country’s history from a multicultural perspective, clumsily cut and recast into more simplified language for young readers.
Veering away from the standard “Master Narrative” to tell “the story of a nation peopled by the world,” the violence- and injustice-laden account focuses on minorities, from African- Americans (“the central minority throughout our country’s history”), Mexicans and Native Americans to Japanese, Vietnamese, Sikh, Russian Jewish and Muslim immigrants. Stefoff reduces Takaki’s scholarly but fluid narrative (1993, revised 2008) to choppy sentences and sound-bite quotes. She also adds debatable generalizations, such as a sweeping claim that Native Americans “lived outside of white society’s borders,” and an incorrect one that the Emancipation Proclamation “freed the slaves.” Readers may take a stronger interest in their own cultural heritage from this broad picture of the United States as, historically, a tapestry of ethnic identities that are “separate but also shared”—but being more readable and, by page count at least, only about a third longer, the original version won’t be out of reach of much of the intended audience, despite its denser prose.
In either iteration, a provocative counter to conventional, blinkered views of our national story. (endnotes, glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60980-416-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Thorough to a fault, and for young readers at least, no replacement for Jim Murphy’s oldie but goodie The Long Road to...
Wagonloads of detail weigh down this overstuffed account of the Civil War’s most significant battle and its aftermath.
Martin builds his narrative around numerous eyewitness accounts, despite the implication of the subtitle. He covers events from the rival armies’ preliminary jockeying for position to Lee’s retreat, the heroic efforts to care for the thousands of wounded soldiers left behind, as well as the establishment some months later of the cemetery that was the occasion for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The battle itself, though, quickly becomes a dizzying tally of this regiment going here, that brigade charging there, the movements insufficiently supported by the small, hard-to-read battle maps. Overheated lines like “As the armies met in battle, the ground…soaked up the blood of Americans flowing into the soil” have a melodramatic effect. Moreover, as nearly everyone mentioned even once gets one or more period portraits, the illustrations become a tedious gallery of look-alike shots of scowling men with heavy facial hair. Still, the author does offer a cogent, carefully researched view of the battle and its significance in both the short and long terms.
Thorough to a fault, and for young readers at least, no replacement for Jim Murphy’s oldie but goodie The Long Road to Gettysburg (1992). (glossary, index, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 12-15)Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-532-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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