Often slow going, but worth the effort.
The life and times of Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, aka Paracelsus, the “father of modern medicine.”
Ball (Critical Mass, 2004, etc.) is interested more in the ideological milieu of the Renaissance than in his subject’s medical career. For good reason: Renaissance medicine was no science. Paracelsus (1493–1541) did favor experience over authority, but even his “reforms” did not go much beyond the witch-doctor stage. Still, he lived in a time when the medieval synthesis was falling apart and did his best to accelerate the process. Son of a village doctor in Switzerland, Paracelsus learned the usual Latin, grammar and rhetoric, but gained more practical knowledge when his father moved to an Austrian mining town where the boy studied metallurgy, later the foundation of his alchemical lore. Early medicine incorporated alchemy and astrology, both changing rapidly after the 15th-century influx of Greek and Arabic knowledge into Europe. Ball surveys both fields, showing what Paracelsus built on as well as what he replaced with his own theories. (Not always an easy distinction to make, given his love of neologisms.) Paracelsus’s idiosyncrasies put him at odds with both the Catholic Church and its emergent Lutheran critics. His vehement opposition to traditional doctors inevitably brought him into conflict with the locals (portraits usually show him wearing a sword), and as a result he led a wandering life, never marrying. The author carefully explains Paracelsus’s theories, clearly showing how he broke with medieval practice, but avoids the temptation to make him a pioneering modern where he is not. A true iconoclast, he inhabited an ideological landscape somewhere between the medieval and the modern. Ball effectively places Paracelsus in the larger context of Renaissance magic and philosophy, and of a turbulent period.
Often slow going, but worth the effort.Pub Date: April 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-22979-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
