There is no chance that the authors will knock Newton off his pedestal, but they present a well-documented argument that he...
The story of Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and Edmond Halley (1656-1742) and an exploration of “how science might have developed if Isaac Newton had never lived.”
Newton was as revered as anyone during his time and will remain a towering figure even to readers of this provocative dual biography, in which the husband-and-wife team of science writers maintain that the great man had feet of clay. The Gribbins (A History of Science in 100 Experiments, 2016, etc.) clearly admire their subjects and dislike Newton—not only for his personality, which most historians agree was execrable, but also his integrity (of lack thereof). They make a good case. A prodigy as a youth, Hooke came to London as a teenager and became the “best experimental scientist of his time, the leading microscopist of the seventeenth century, an astronomer of the first rank, and he developed an understanding of earthquakes, fossils, and the history of the earth that would not be surpassed for a century.” Newton claimed credit for many of Hooke’s discoveries, including his First Law of Motion, the concept of gravity as a universal attractive force, and the inverse square law of gravity. Hooke’s reputation has revived over the past century, and he has been called Britain’s Leonardo da Vinci. Halley, known these days only for the eponymous comet, was another spectacularly energetic polymath who produced the first atlas of the southern skies, captained and navigated the first official scientific voyage to the southern seas, and produced a steady stream of scientific observations. Perhaps most important, he got along well with Newton and prodded him to write the Principia, paying for its publication.
There is no chance that the authors will knock Newton off his pedestal, but they present a well-documented argument that he owed more to the ideas of others than he admitted.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-22675-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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