There is no chance that the authors will knock Newton off his pedestal, but they present a well-documented argument that he...
The story of Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and Edmond Halley (1656-1742) and an exploration of “how science might have developed if Isaac Newton had never lived.”
Newton was as revered as anyone during his time and will remain a towering figure even to readers of this provocative dual biography, in which the husband-and-wife team of science writers maintain that the great man had feet of clay. The Gribbins (A History of Science in 100 Experiments, 2016, etc.) clearly admire their subjects and dislike Newton—not only for his personality, which most historians agree was execrable, but also his integrity (of lack thereof). They make a good case. A prodigy as a youth, Hooke came to London as a teenager and became the “best experimental scientist of his time, the leading microscopist of the seventeenth century, an astronomer of the first rank, and he developed an understanding of earthquakes, fossils, and the history of the earth that would not be surpassed for a century.” Newton claimed credit for many of Hooke’s discoveries, including his First Law of Motion, the concept of gravity as a universal attractive force, and the inverse square law of gravity. Hooke’s reputation has revived over the past century, and he has been called Britain’s Leonardo da Vinci. Halley, known these days only for the eponymous comet, was another spectacularly energetic polymath who produced the first atlas of the southern skies, captained and navigated the first official scientific voyage to the southern seas, and produced a steady stream of scientific observations. Perhaps most important, he got along well with Newton and prodded him to write the Principia, paying for its publication.
There is no chance that the authors will knock Newton off his pedestal, but they present a well-documented argument that he owed more to the ideas of others than he admitted.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-22675-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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