This richly illustrated, engrossing account makes a good case that da Vinci was not only ahead of his time but ahead of our...
A lucid examination of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), emphasizing his immense secret journal.
In an excellent translation by Frisch, German science writer Klein (The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity, 2008, etc.) states that early da Vinci scholars were mostly art historians. However, as they assembled thousands of pages, notebooks and fragments scattered across the world after his death, scientists and engineers joined in extolling his insights. The author traveled across Europe and America, considering along the way da Vinci paintings, manuscripts and a few remaining engineering works that reveal the scope of his genius. Besides describing da Vinci’s research in anatomy, physics, hydraulics, military weapons and flight, Klein also highlights enthusiasts devoted to building the inventions whose beautiful diagrams have long graced coffee-table histories. The long chapter on the Mona Lisa shows da Vinci’s exhaustive curiosity—he worked on it for 15 years. Dozens of journal pages illustrate his study of light, color and human anatomy, all of which contribute to the painting’s brilliance. Flying also fascinated da Vinci, and many of his extraordinarily precise analyses of bird flight were only confirmed by 20th-century stop-motion photography. Klein describes da Vinci as the first modern scientist, obsessed with understanding the world as it actually worked, which turned out to be different from the explanations by traditional authorities.
This richly illustrated, engrossing account makes a good case that da Vinci was not only ahead of his time but ahead of our own.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81825-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
