Lifelong friends since 1813, when they were students at Cambridge University, the scientists—William Whewell, Charles...
Snyder (Philosophy/St. John’s Univ.; Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society, 2006) shows how four British “natural philosophers” helped launch modern science.
Lifelong friends since 1813, when they were students at Cambridge University, the scientists—William Whewell, Charles Babbage, John Herschel and Richard Jones—shared a belief in the importance of precise measurement and calculations as the basis for the scientific method and advocated public support for science. The author makes a convincing case that not only did each of these men make important individual contributions—Whewell became the master of Trinity College, Cambridge; Herschel mapped the southern skies; Babbage invented the first computer; Jones was a pioneer in developing statistical economics—but together they played a vital role in transforming science. One of the group’s running debates—on the role of God in the evolution of new species—was influential in helping Darwin formulate the theory of natural selection. The breakfast club where they met regularly at Cambridge to discuss their ideas led 20 years later to the formation of the British Association for the Advancement of Society, which they helped found. In 1833, Whewell chaired its third meeting and in response to an attack from the Romantic poet Coleridge—who derided its members as mere experimenters “digging in fossil pits, or performing experiments with electrical apparatus”—coined the term “scientist” as a replacement for “natural philosophers.” The much older Royal Society continued to exist, but its meetings were poorly attended. On the other hand, BAAS meetings, a forerunner of modern scientific conferences, drew thousands and shaped the direction of science, opening their meetings to the broader public and reintroducing debate, which had been banned by the Society since the days of Newton.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7679-3048-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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