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 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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