An erudite investigation into the work of the man regarded as the founder of the Scientific Revolution, this volume attempts to tie together Bacon’s many writings, not only on science, but also on language, morals, politics, rhetoric, law, and history. From the outset, Zagorin, a professor of history emeritus at the University of Rochester, clearly states that it is not his intention to write a biography of Bacon, who has been the subject of numerous and recent biographies. However, he does provide a tantalizing glimpse of Bacon’s personal life, as well as his flawed character. Much to his credit, Zagorin demythologizes Bacon by detailing his political ambitions and ruthless opportunism. Yet the glimpse is all too brief, and while this biographical introduction informs the rest of the book, Zagorin’s later readings of Bacon would have benefited from a more integrated approach toward his life and his work. The bulk of the book is a thorough interpretation of that work and its impact. Zagorin illustrates in a sound and convincing manner how Bacon’s philosophy and theory of science had a far-reaching effect on the growth of science. While Bacon made no scientific discoveries of his own, he did believe that science provided humankind with the instrument to master nature. Finally, at the end of the book, the author delves into Bacon’s less known works in the humanities, proving that in these fields, too, Bacon was an original and often brilliant thinker. As a legal scholar, for instance, Bacon sought to devise a universal system that went beyond English common law. Though lucidly written, this book still requires a knowledge of Bacon’s work as formidable as Zagorin’s. A valuable work for the serious Bacon scholar, but not for the layperson. (20 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-691-05928-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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
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