The 17th and 18th centuries saw a scientific revolution unlike any in history; here’s a look at the remarkable men (and a few women) who brought it about. While her subject is international in scope, and in its broadest outlines spans three centuries, Jardine (Worldly Goods, 1996) keeps her primary focus on London in the last few decades of the 17th century, when the Royal Society was in its glory. An exclusive club for the investigation of nature, it drew an incredible array of talents: Newton and Halley, Boyle and Wren, along with dozens of lesser-known scientists and curious amateurs like Pepys. Its meetings ran the gamut from science to showmanship, usually under the direction of Robert Hooke, who responded to scientific questions by building instruments to investigate them. And, as Jardine shows, there were plenty of oversized egos in the mix: After Hooke criticized his paper on optics, Newton stayed aloof from the Royal Society until after Hooke’s death in 1704. John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, refused to publish his observations—and when Newton tricked him into letting some loose, won authorization to destroy the unsold portion of the print run. Here too are wonderful unknowns, from Hans Sloane, who introduced milk chocolate to Europe, to John Tradescant, who assembled a botanical garden so various that contemporaries dubbed it the “Ark.” The author gives due emphasis to the work of continental investigators such as Huygens, Leeuwenhoek, and Cassini, and to the importance of voyages to exotic locales like St. Helena, South Africa, and the Americas in bringing new specimens back for Europe to study. She provides ample citations from contemporary sources and many contemporary illustrations to convey the flavor of the times, and has a good sense of when to give the reader a taste of the scandals, feuds, and scientific donnybrooks of the era. Well-written, unfailingly lively, and packed with fascinating characters—one of the best scientific histories in years.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-49325-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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