Meticulous research and capacious imagination inform this absorbing tale of genius, personality, and the vagaries of...
The incredibly cluttered and productive life of the cantankerous wizard who vied with Newton and with history, losing both struggles until very recently.
With the near-simultaneous publication of two full-length biographies (Lisa Jardine’s The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Feb. 2004), Hooke’s reputation appears to have been restored. While researching A History of London (1999), Inwood became convinced that Hooke (1635–1703) had been unjustly treated by historians, who tended to portray him as irascible and arrogant. He may have claimed to have invented or discovered virtually every scientific device and principle in the 17th century, the biographer concedes, but his actual achievements were almost as astonishing. A gifted inventor of both grand and risible creations, an architect and builder who shared with Christopher Wren the responsibilities for rebuilding London after the Great Fire, teacher, coffee house raconteur, astronomer, microscopist, cometographer, dissector, vivisector, artist—all these hats and more Hooke wore, most with enormous distinction. Like Jardine, Inwood contends that Hooke attempted to keep so many balls in the air that he lost track and was beaned by a few. He was inadequate as secretary of the Royal Society, and his unprepossessing appearance and crusty demeanor alienated some important contemporaries who would subsequently drive the sharpest nails in the coffin of his reputation. Inwood does a remarkable job of explaining in (sometimes excessive) detail the myriad experiments and demonstrations Hooke prepared for the Royal Society and for his lectures at London’s Gresham College. He also excels in his Hooke-ian attempt to keep multiple narrative threads in the balance, endeavoring to show us the days and weeks with all their myriad activities rather than focusing in turn on, say, Hooke’s inventions, his architecture, his coffee housing, his sex life (Hooke had an ongoing sexual relationship with his niece).
Meticulous research and capacious imagination inform this absorbing tale of genius, personality, and the vagaries of reputation. (16 pp. b&w illustrations)Pub Date: April 19, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-56-7
Page Count: 500
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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