A passionately presented book that offers sparkling tangents for further study.
A history of the startling scientific innovations that rose to meet disconcerting troubles in revolutionary France.
Jones (Genetics/Univ. Coll. London; The Serpent's Promise: The Bible Retold as Science, 2013, etc.) fashions an elegant, somewhat meandering, and never dull narrative about the rich contributions by Age of Enlightenment–era French scientists who were encouraged by the wobbly state and monarchy to come up with solutions to mankind’s many problems. These involved addressing famine, correct measurements (the metric system), modern maps, new crops, and the establishment of new observatories and academies. Many of these scientists—all male save for mathematician Sophie Germain and, later, chemist Marie Curie—were members of the Collège de France (which received a “spring clean” by Louis XV’s finance minister, the economist Jacques Turgot) or the Royal Academy of Sciences. They included well-educated aristocrats who were also civic-minded—e.g., the radical Jean-Paul Marat, who was trained in medicine and known for conducting studies of venereal infections. In Paris, the wild enthusiasm for the electrical experiments of adopted Frenchman Benjamin Franklin occurred “at a period when science had entered the public arena, and when there seemed to be almost no limit to what it could do.” In a loosely thematic approach, Jones delves into the world-changing experiments and research by these able and daring scientists, beginning with the harnessing of electricity and working through the revolution itself, which was a “celebration of reason over passion” (at least at first). The author notes that the revolutionary year of 1789 also saw the publication of seminal works by Antoine Lavoisier, botanist Antoine de Jussieu, and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. Jones also examines the processes of solving problems related to explosives, famine calories and heat retention, flight, relativity, evolution, and chaos in the universe.
A passionately presented book that offers sparkling tangents for further study.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-309-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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