A significant achievement that builds on previous works and takes the next step in establishing Harriot's genius.
In a largely harmonious meld of biography and science writing, Arianrhod (Seduced by Logic: Émilie Du Châtelet, Mary Somerville and the Newtonian Revolution, 2012, etc.) furthers the drive to resurrect the reputation of English mathematician Thomas Harriot (1560-1621).
The author, a research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, writes with the authority of a distinguished professor, placing Harriot's achievements in the context of his era and of the evolution of science. Early on, he worked in navigational theory and was indispensable to ventures to the New World mounted by Sir Walter Raleigh; Harriot was especially adept at interacting with native peoples. Apart from astronomy and optics, he soon branched out into the then-unnamed studies of ethnology, linguistics, and physics, his questing mind and new mathematical approaches in some ways anticipating Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, and even Newton. Sadly, until recently, Harriot's name and contributions, many of them eminently practical, had been all but lost to history, largely because of his failures to publish many of his findings (often for valid reasons). Arianrhod does not attempt “retrofitting Harriot into a celebrity star system,” which she regards as misguided. However, she demonstrates how he was on equal footing with giants, especially in his gift for employing novel approaches to recognizing general patterns and devising solutions. Filling in the gaps of a transitional era with deep background, the author alternates between straight histories and a close examination of Harriot's calculations, experiments, and theories. Although designed for a general audience, readers must be prepared to wade through tables and formulae better grasped by fellow mathematicians. Nonetheless, the richness of biographical and historical detail more than compensates for the effort. The book is almost as much a biography of Raleigh, Harriot's longtime patron and friend, who emerges as a complex but remarkable man, and of Raleigh's formidable wife, Bess.
A significant achievement that builds on previous works and takes the next step in establishing Harriot's genius.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-027185-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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