We think of Big Science, with heavy government support and huge teams working on long-term projects, as typically modern, but Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was thinking big in the late 16th century. While Copernicus laid the theoretical foundation for the new astronomy, it was Tycho (1546-1601) who brought it to fruition with his meticulous observations and the regular publication of his results. A Danish noble educated in German universities, Tycho inherited landed wealth, but the life of a courtier did not interest him. In 1575, he convinced King Frederick II to give him as his fief the island of Hven, where he constructed a world-class observatory, with numerous instruments he designed and built himself. Tycho’s plans involved considerable social upheaval on Hven. The project drafted the local peasants and fishermen for “boon labor,” and brought in specialists from all over Europe. At its peak, Uraniborg (as the science center was called) supported not only Tycho’s large family and servants, but a substantial group of assistants. After a day’s work, the extended family of Tycho’s scholars would gather for a communal dinner, at which they would improvise Latin verse, drink deeply, and discuss their findings in the light of neo-Platonist philosophy. Christianson (History/Luther College) puts Tycho’s scientific achievements in the context of the daily life, intellectual milieu, and courtly politics of the era. He provides full scholarly apparatus, including short biographies of Tycho’s assistants’some, like Johannes Kepler, famous in their own right, others comparatively obscure—a useful glossary of technical terms, and numerous illustrations. Despite his often dry style, Christianson provides a double share of fascinating insights into the era and the career of perhaps the greatest astronomer of the pre-telescope era. A gold mine for anyone interested in one of the giants of Renaissance science.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-521-65081-X
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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