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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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