Meticulously instructive both on a scientific revolution and the personalities who achieved it.
Science writer Ferguson (Measuring the Universe, 1999, etc.) fully illuminates a 17th-century collaboration that launched a true understanding of the solar system.
At their first meeting in 1600 in Prague, Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe was 53, German mathematician and teacher Johannes Kepler just 28. Brahe was a renowned “naked eye” astronomer, having observed and accumulated data on planetary positions and movements for more than three decades; Kepler was obsessed with the idea that God’s universe must be structured from regular geometric and harmonic patterns that numbers could ultimately reveal. There were a few commonalities: both had leaned away from Catholicism, and both had earned favors casting “calendars” (horoscopes) with astrological portents in which neither really believed, although Brahe consulted with kings, Kepler with burgomasters. With intimate knowledge of both the great Dane and the obscure Lutheran (not nearly as reticent, Ferguson asserts, as some accounts have held), the author masterfully follows each across the turbulent stage of northern Europe after the Reformation to their common destiny: final obliteration of the thousand-year-old tenet of Ptolemaic astronomy, long rooted in ecclesiastical belief, that the Sun and its planets orbit Earth. Brahe is in decline, while Kepler’s fixation on fitting planetary orbits within geometric solids is, we now know, close to a nutball scheme. Yet little more than a decade later, after Brahe died in 1604 pleading to his assistant, “Let me not have lived in vain,” Kepler produced his immutable Laws of Planetary Motion. “Kepler had become a virtuoso in the use of Tycho’s observations,” Ferguson observes, “devising ingenious ways to exploit their unique accuracy and comprehensiveness. Such mastery of the creative nexus between observation and theory has seldom been achieved and never surpassed in the entire history of science.”
Meticulously instructive both on a scientific revolution and the personalities who achieved it.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-8027-1390-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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