Nothing seems beyond Fara’s grasp in her scholarly examination of apples and alchemy, physics and fame, public relations and...
Fascinating if sometimes dense study describing how Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) came to be regarded as the world’s first scientific genius.
The word “scientist” did not even exist until 100 years after Newton’s death, notes Fara (History and Philosophy of Science/Cambridge); he was known during his lifetime not so much for the laws of motion and optics as for his expertise on biblical chronologies (to him we owe the current obsession of Satanists with the number 666) and on the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts. The author sketches what details we have concerning Newton’s life (no one knows for certain when he was born) and describes his most enduring achievement: demonstrating that bodies in the heavens obey the same physical laws as those on earth. Informing us that there is no way to verify the falling-apple story, Fara moves on to examine the images of Newton in paintings, etchings, and sculptures during and after his life. She also assesses his popularizers—including the adventurous folks who published the fashionable book Newton for the Ladies—and explores the rivalry between Newton and Leibniz, noting the irony that the latter is remembered as a philosopher rather than as the formidable mathematician he was. Meanwhile, throughout this engaging text, she displays an easy familiarity with arts and letters as well as with the relevant scientific literature. Most interesting of all are Fara’s discussions of the evolving notion of “genius.” She notes with amusement the thin line between “genius” and “insanity,” then discusses how the mantle of “genius” has passed from Newton to Einstein to Hawking and reveals that at a 1998 auction a first edition of Newton’s Principia (1687) went for nearly £2 million.
Nothing seems beyond Fara’s grasp in her scholarly examination of apples and alchemy, physics and fame, public relations and reputation. (41 illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-231-12806-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
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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