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 book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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