Ferguson shows the main currents clearly, without complicated math, although readers with some knowledge of geometry and...
A stimulating, wide-ranging look at how the Greek mathematician and philosopher’s key insights have been at the heart of an enormous range of subsequent thought.
Mention Pythagoras and most people think of the geometrical theorem that bears his name. Science writer Ferguson (Tycho & Kepler, 2003, etc.) shows how much more his ideas have meant to both science and philosophy. Biographical data is sparse: Pythagoras was probably born around 570 BCE on the Aegean isle Samos, studied in Asia and possibly Egypt and settled in Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy. There he founded a school of philosophy based on mathematics. A key discovery was that a vibrating string produces pleasing harmonies when divided into simple ratios. From this insight, the Pythagoreans posited that numbers lie behind all of nature. In particular, they believed in the music of the spheres, caused by the movement of the planets. They were also vegetarians and believed in reincarnation. Ferguson traces the ways in which later philosophers drew on their central ideas. Plato, who met some of Pythagoras’s disciples during a visit to Italy, used a geometrical proof in one of his dialogues and was thought by his successors to have drawn heavily on Pythagorean doctrines. Plato’s pervasive influence on later philosophers meant that Pythagorean ideas concerning mathematics were transmitted down the ages and can be found not only in philosophy, but in astronomy and the other exact sciences. This holds especially true for the music of the spheres, which was taken literally by no less a scientist than Kepler and served as an important metaphor for major poets into the 19th century. The Pythagorean faith in the mathematical foundation and ultimate comprehensibility of the universe played a key role in physics, from Newton through Einstein right up to today’s string theories.
Ferguson shows the main currents clearly, without complicated math, although readers with some knowledge of geometry and music theory are most likely to enjoy the book.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1631-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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