by Roland Jackson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2018
A lengthy, difficult book about a remarkable man; devoted readers will muddle through.
A massive biography of one of the Victorian era’s most significant all-around scientists.
Science historian Jackson sets himself the monumental task of sorting through the volumes of writing of Irish scientist John Tyndall (1820-1893), who began his career as a surveyor for the railroads. A true autodidact, in 1847 he was hired to teach at Queenwood College, where he was able to attend lectures on chemistry and botany and learned about discovery-based and child-centered learning. He also became aware of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings, which, along with those of Thomas Carlyle, influenced his work. Eventually, Tyndall began to teach lectures in physics at a time when laboratory science held little priority in British schools. He received a doctorate in Germany, where he developed his belief in the importance of molecular structure and his consummate skill in experimental design and execution. Seemingly always at work, he read widely in philosophy and wrote about his travels for publication while studying crystal structure and transmission of heat. It was the latter work that led to the discovery that Earth’s atmosphere retained heat (greenhouse effect). His work on heat conduction in glaciers (supported by his Alpine mountaineering), structure of matter, promotion of scientific curriculum for schools, and classic demonstrations of science ensured that he was famous in his own time. He was sought after not only for his lectures, but also for his congeniality as a dinner guest. He was not, however, a mathematical physicist; he was an experimentalist—one of the best—rather than a theoretician. He disproved and/or improved others’ theories and showed that pure science could lead to practical applications. The author notes a gap in Tyndall’s journals from 1871 to 1883, a fact which readers may well appreciate. The book is chock-full of lists of friends he visited and lectures given and attended, and these sections become tiresome. Readers should have more than high school physics to comprehend Tyndall’s work.
A lengthy, difficult book about a remarkable man; devoted readers will muddle through.Pub Date: July 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-878895-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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by Ebony Bynum & Roland Jackson & illustrated by Baba Wagué Diakité
by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Emmanuel Carrère translated by Linda Coverdale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2011
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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