Irmscher makes a convincing case that this egotistical, often wrongheaded figure deserves his reputation as a founder and...
A thoroughly satisfying biography of the almost but not quite forgotten Swiss-born Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), who moved to the United States in 1846 to become a combination of educator, media star and beloved science guru.
Though Agassiz’s genuine scientific contributions, such as the classification of extinct fish, had little popular appeal, his contemporaries thrilled at his assertion that great ice sheets had once covered the continents. Others had the idea earlier; the fiercely ambitious Agassiz took credit, but Irmscher (English/Indiana Univ.; Longfellow Redux, 2006) adds that his energetic research, writing and lectures won over the scientific community. Nowadays, Agassiz is mostly known for stubbornly opposing Darwinian evolution, preferring his version of a glorious nature filled with unchanging, divinely created species. This had no effect on his immense popularity but marginalized him among scientists. Sympathetic to his subject, Irmscher recounts the surprising amount of ridicule he received from evolutionists, including the usually benign Darwin. While admitting that Agassiz missed the boat, the author maintains that, for all his posturing and self-promotion and the offensive, pseudo-scientific racism fashionable at the time, he was an inspirational, insightful and unwearying scientific observer. His voluminous collection and publications remain impressive achievements.
Irmscher makes a convincing case that this egotistical, often wrongheaded figure deserves his reputation as a founder and first great popularizer of American science.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-57767-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
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