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Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture. This book was both fascinating, especially given my visit to the Duomo in June 2000, and entertaining. The author weaves an engrossing tale about the political intrigue, personal jealousies, dramatic setbacks, and inventive brilliance that are part of the Duomo's story. The paranoid Filippo Brunelleschi, "who was so proud of his inventions and so fearful of plagiarism," saw his dome completed only months before his death. The author argues that Brunelleschi's brilliant improvisations in solving the problem of suspending the enormous cupola in bricks and mortar (painstakingly detailed with precise illustrations) led him to "succeed in performing an engineering feat whose structural daring was without parallel." The absorbing details range from discussions of the construction of building materials to the dome's subsequent use as a scientific instrument by Florentine astronomer Paolo Toscanelli. "King illuminates the mysterious sources of inspiration and the secretive methods of this architectural genius in a fascinating chronicle of the building of his masterwork, the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore."—Booklist Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance. I haven't studied much physics, and I admit that what I found most interesting about this biography of Albert Einstein was his personal life and not the details of his theories, but the author covers both. Aided by hundreds of published and unpublished letters from The Einstein Project, Overbye describes the man behind the myth, and he probably does as good a job as anyone can in describing Einstein's complicated theories in layman's terms. The book concentrates on the years between 1896 (when the 17-year-old Einstein arrived in Zurich to study physics) and 1919 (when he used measurements of light deflection during a solar eclipse to support his new theory of relativity, thus beginning his reign as the 20th century's most famous scientist). This period begins with Einstein meeting fellow student Mileva Maric, who became his first wife and with whom he had three children (the first before they were married), and closes with his second marriage to his cousin. "Physics was not all Einstein's life," writes Overbye. "He lived on Earth with a belly and a heart." Accordingly, the book depicts a young man who liked to hike, play the violin, flirt, and tell dirty jokes; who was careless of convention in dress, grooming, and other's feelings; who feared his passions for women (yet gave in to them many times); who today would probably have been labeled "a geek." Although, unfortunately, I could not grasp most of Einstein's theories, what I did understand—and found interesting—was the history of physics, which laid out the issues with which Einstein grappled and the ideas on which he built (he didn't just produce his theories out of thin air) and suggested why his solutions were so revolutionary. Overbye also describes the great resistance that Einstein's theories encountered within the scientific community—and even mistakes he made. I wish the book would have continued past 1921. An afterword describes how the Jewish Swissman, who had long ago foresworn German citizenship, fled to the U.S. shortly before WWII, but I wanted to know more about his activities during those turbulent years and his life in America. Expecting Adam. This is an autobiographical story of a couple whose pregnancy with and birth of a Down's baby challenges and uplifts their lives. The conception and birth of a Down's baby could be depressing, and documentation of a spiritual journey involving out-of-body experiences; calming, invisible hands; and epiphanies of light and love could be cloying or ridiculous. But Beck's writing is not only down-to-earth, heart-rending, and tender, but also laugh-out-loud funny, transcending potential literary pitfalls. Because Beck is trained as a methodical academician, her step-by-step explanation of her own progress from doubt to belief feels reliable. However, whatever readers believe of her experiences is ultimately a moot issue. The most important point is obvious: Adam—a boy who sees the world as a series of connections between people who love each other—is a tremendous gift to Beck and her family. I think their story is a gift to all who read the book. Galileo's Daughter. Albert Einstein called Galileo "the father of modern physics—indeed of modern science altogether." Although he never left Italy during his long life (1564-1642), his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. Most sensationally, his telescopes allowed him to reveal a new reality in the heavens and to reinforce the astounding argument that the Earth moves around the Sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and forced to spend his last years under house arrest. Galileo had three illegitimate children; his oldest, Virginia, was closest to him. When she was 13, Galileo placed her in a convent near him, and there she spent her life. Her loving support, through their correspondence and his visits, was Galileo's greatest source of strength throughout his most productive and tumultuous years. By moving between Galileo's public life and his daughter's sequestered world, the author illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was being overturned, and when one man sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. The author's choice of well-presented personal and historical details not only kept me interested in Galileo the philosopher and his times, but made me care about Galileo the man and his daughter. "Deftly weaving dense historical detail with the warm, earnest, and solicitous writings of a loving daughter, Sobel...transform[s] what could have been a dusty academic subject into a rich, gripping page-turner."—Entertainment Weekly Hunger in Holland: Life During the Nazi Occupation. This is a first-person account of life in Holland during the Nazi occupation of WWII. The author was 12 when Germans invaded, and her book describes the resulting loss of freedom, scarcity of food, and steady deterioration of normal, everyday life in Rotterdam as she and her family were forced to adapt to the conditions of a police state. At 12, she had to take responsibility for begging for food and helping to hide her father from the Nazis, who were shipping every man they could find to German munitions factories. Although the plight of Dutch Jews is well known, for example through the diary of Anne Frank, it never occurred to me that non-Jews were also struggling to maintain normalcy under terror from the Nazis. As I read about this family slowly descending from comfortable, middle-class into the horrors of deprivation, hunger, subjugation, and death, it was hard to imagine how I might have survived. I discussed this book with Jan, and then with Jan's mother, who was also a teenager during WWII in Rotterdam. After reading the book herself, she confirmed that much in it is true to her own experience. This made the events of the book even more real—and more horrifying. American citizens have never experienced similar invasion and subjugation, so it's hard to relate to the experiences of so many western Europeans, and as 9/11 showed, our success and isolation has made us cocky. I think we need to understand this major difference in our histories, which influences our countries' world views, politics, and cultures. Life Is So Good. This book is absolutely inspiring. It describes how an illiterate black man earned his living for most of a 20th century—years of wandering, taking hard labor jobs, following the rules for survival in a white man's world. At an age when white boys were getting their favorite toys, he left home to work on a white man's farm. . .truly a hired "hand," not acknowledged as a youngster who needed family, recreation, education, social development, and nurturing. He hoarded the few dollars he earned, never complaining about his plight. Unable to decipher a newspaper, George Dawson took little notice of the progress occurring around him—modern appliances, jobs with fringe benefits, the historical and social revolutions permeating America. Nevertheless, he survived—and remained content. His greatest miracle, though, came at age 98, when he learned to read. At that point, he started to grasp what others had known. Reading Dawson's story, I grieved over what he missed in life; rejoiced at his delayed triumphs. This is a book that makes you realize just how fortunate you are—even more fortunate to share in Dawson's fortitude and gratitude. "I tell people not to worry about things, not to worry about their lives. Things will be all right. People need to hear that. Life is good, just as it is. There isn't anything I would change about my life."—George Dawson Living Out Loud. Quindlen won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. This book is based on her syndicated New York Times column "Life in the Thirties," a series of personal reflections and reminiscences of everyday living. I love both what she has to say—her philosophy, her observations, the relevance of her topics—and the way she says it. She notices the small but important details of life, and she treats the world with intelligence, compassion, humanity, humor, and just plain common sense. Her three-page essays are grouped under the topic areas of Looking Back, Being a Woman, Loving a Man, Becoming a Mother, Raising a Child, Fooling Around, Keeping the Faith, Taking a Stand, Facing the Worst, and Growing Up. "Anna Quindlen is a wry and wonderful observer who can make me laugh out loud when she writes about fixing her hems with Elmer's glue or surviving the nuns of her Catholic childhood, nod my head in silent agreement when she describes the pleasures and perils of marriage and motherhood, and rethink my opinions when she takes on almost anything from Watergate to abortion. Living Out Loud is fresh and original and very, very smart. It is also a lot of fun." —Marie Brenner Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. This remarkable book is Eva Hoffman's personal story of her experiences as an emigré who lost and remade her identity in a new land and translated her sense of self into a new culture and a different language. The book traces the struggle of a musically gifted, passionate, and thoughtful adolescent who is painfully uprooted when her Polish family emigrates to Canada, where she is "stuffed into a false persona" and pitched headlong into a strange language. Hoffman describes those early years as defined by marginality and dislocation. Recreating her frustration at being unable to express wit and irony, and her confusion and distress over her loss of verbal spontaneity, she articulates the idea that linguistic dispossession is "close to dispossession of oneself." Hoffman's book is a deeply felt meditation on the nature of language and its crucial connections to personal identity. She explores the agony of learning to articulate in a new voice that can encompass dreams and intimacy, political discourse, academic argument, memory, and gossip. Her journey moves from the Poland of her childhood to adult life as a professional New York writer, and from the nostalgia, rage, and alienation of internal exile to the fully fledged "invention of another me." "Hoffman raises one provocative question after another about the relationship between language and culture...and about the emotional cost of re-creating oneself."—Newsday Madame de Pompadour: Mistress of France. This biography of the legendary mistress of King Louis XV of France offers insight into one of the most powerful and feared women of history. It describes the arc of her life from her modest beginnings in early-eighteenth-century Paris to her reign as the undisputed mistress of Versailles, tracing the astonishing rise of a remarkable, self-made woman that confounded the most experienced and sophisticated of her contemporaries. Groomed from an early age to assume the role of a rich man's mistress, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson underwent a number of transformations—from a halfhearted marriage to a Parisian tax collector to a lifelong involvement with the financial elite of France—before she captivated the king himself and was officially recognized as his maîtresse déclarée. Although accustomed to the king's extramarital relationships, the court was shocked at the sudden ascension of the low-born Mademoiselle Poisson. She wasted no time, however, in quickly establishing herself as the king's sole confident and, ultimately, his indispensable partner in affairs of state. The author not only skillfully illuminates of the characters of Madame de Pompadour, the king, and his subjects (such as Pompadour's good friend Voltaire), as well as fascinating details of daily court life, but also defining moments of European history that occur around her and because of her. From reading this book, I think I have a much better understand of the factors that led to the French Revolution, some 30 years after Madame de Pompadour's death. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I read this book just after returning home from our trip to Savannah. Although reading it beforehand would have given more meaning to some of the places we visited, reading it afterward allowed me to accurately picture in my mind's eye the locations and people the book describes so entertainingly. The book is both a true-crime murder story and a deliciously perverse travelogue. The author obviously has great affection for the city he visited and then lived in for over eight years, including the many outrageous characters found behind the genteel façades of Savannah's beautiful mansions. These include society ladies who compare notes on their husbands' suicides; a hilariously foul-mouthed black drag queen; a voodoo priestess who works her roots in the graveyard at midnight; a morose inventor who owns a bottle of poison powerful enough to kill everyone in town; a prominent antiques dealer who hangs a Nazi flag from his window to disrupt the shooting of a movie; and a redneck gigolo whose conquests describe him as a "walking streak of sex." This would be a very entertaining book even if you haven't been to Savannah; and don't rely on the movie, as the book offers so much more. Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. This absorbing book, written in 1995, is suddenly very relevant after September 11, 2001. It examines how the daily lives of Muslim women are shaped by the history, culture, and holy texts of Islam. Geraldine Brooks was a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent who covered the Middle east for six years in the 1980s, and she presents a shrewd and intimate analysis of the past and present Muslim world. She is careful to distinguish misogyny and oppressive cultural traditions from what she considers the true teachings of the Koran. I found myself often feeling angry with some of the Muslim cultures that treat women so harshly, and puzzled by some educated women who purposefully allow themselves to be subjugated. But the book also left me feeling better educated about the history, cultures, religion, and issues related to Muslim women. "Avoids both the sensational and the stereotypical...insightful...a valid, entertaining account of women in the Muslim world."—New York Times Book Review Paris to the Moon. I read half of this book on the plane to Paris in March 2002. The other half I read while touring Paris and the Loire Valley. I loved it. Gopnik is an essayist who has written for The New Yorker, among other illustrious publications. He is funny, personal, and insightful. The book is a series of essays about moving his wife and small son to Paris in 1995 and living there for five years. Reading it heightened my experience in Paris, as I kept reading about places I'd been and experiences similar to mine. I had to laugh the hardest at the convergence of our experiences with the French computer keyboard, which he wrote about in the context of the state library and I used (or, tried to use) at an Internet cafe on the Champs-Elysees. The frustration and paralysis I felt were exactly what he'd described (and that's a story you should let Gopnik tell you)! "Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon abounds in the sensuous delights of the city—the magical carousel in the Luxembourg Gardens, the tomato dessert at Arpege, even the exquisite awfulness of the new state library. But the even greater joys of this exquisite memoir are timeless and even placeless—the excitement of the journey, the confusion of an outsider, and, most of all, the love of a family."—Jeffrey Toobin Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization. This book is the interesting story of a modern convention: that of tuning keyboards so that every key is equally in tune (and equally out of tune). First, I was astounded to learn that until just the last two centuries, this had not been the case! Second, I was surprised to learn that the journey to equal temperament involved not only musicians over the centuries but famous men in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, aesthetics, religion, politics, and physics, beginning from the time of Pythagoras and Aristotle. The author does a good job of making this seemingly arcane topic interesting to the general reader. He distills the mathematics and music theory into their simplest essences and draws apt analogies from the everyday. He also generously peppers the text with the quirks and escapades of its more flamboyant central characters. One critic mentioned that while the book is the history of "equal temperament," it neglects "well-temperament." Namesake of Bach's masterful collection of 24 pieces (one each in all the major and minor keys), the well-tempered keyboard liberated composers from the howl of badly tuned keys in the way equal temperament did, while preserving the distinct quality of each key. It was a pragmatic and aesthetically rich solution that captivated composers and theorists for decades. Nevertheless, I'm hardly an expert, just an amateur pianist and singer, as well as a dabbler in history, so I didn't miss the information. What the book did include I found informative, accessible, and worth the read. Thinking Out Loud. Quindlen won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. This book is based on her New York Times column "Public and Private," syndicated throughout the country. I love both what she has to say—her philosophy, her politics, the relevance of her topics—and the way she says it. She notices the small but important details of life, and she treats the world with intelligence, compassion, humanity, humor, and just plain common sense. Her three-page essays are grouped under the topic areas of Unsolicited Opinions, Kids and Animals, On the News, and Women's Rites. "Quindlen displays...an easy, elegant prose style and a canny eye for small details that reveal larger truths about people and society." —New York Newsday Vermeer, A View of Delft. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this is a fascinating portrait of Vermeer—the artist-poet of light, serenity, the interior life, and womankind—long lost in history. Drawing on period documents and intelligent curiosity, Bailey makes up for a paucity of documentation of Vermeer's life and temperament by presenting an energetically detailed depiction of Delft and the atmosphere of the times, Vermeer's contemporaries, and his domestic life. Organized around individual paintings, the book begins with the great gunpowder explosion of 1654 and ends with the reverberations of Vermeer's art in the writings of Marcel Proust and the forgeries of Hans Van Meegeren. Along the way Bailey muses on Protestant Vermeer's marriage to a well-off Catholic and his chaotic household (including the mystery of how Vermeer achieved the quiet, even holy, perfection of his paintings with 11 young children underfoot), and theorizes that Vermeer took over his father's art dealership. Shedding light on both the science and artistry behind the paintings, the author discusses Vermeer's possible use of a camera obscura and his potential acquaintance with the pioneering naturalist Anthony van Leeuwenhoek. Dead at 43, Vermeer left only 35 masterpieces to ensure his immortality, and Bailey includes discussion of those paintings' many influences on subsequent art, literature, and even war. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, both the discussions of Vermeer's life and times and the reflections on his art.
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