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A review by korrick
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
5.0
4.5/5
Of all the books I added back in the day in an attempt to straddle between my (then) career of science and my (continuing) devotion to literature, this has been the most successful of the bunch. It's not the easiest read by far when it comes to the fields of literature, history, and science, and I do have to wonder whether the reprieve that the small typeface granted to my wrist was worth the strain put on my eyes. However, what Holmes achieves is, for me, the optimal mix between fact, context, theory, and, something that so little tried and so often go amiss when it is indeed attempted, compassion. What I mean by that last is the kind of authorial viewpoint that is so often shunted towards feminism, post-colonialism, or any sort of field of thought that takes into account the power structures impacting all sorts of publication and goes out of its way to qualify, rehabilitate, and revive. Thus the especial points paid to the self-governance and cultural relativism of the indigenous peoples of Tahiti, the inclusion of women in the scientific field in all their strictured accomplishments, and all in all a focus on science that reflects on the uneven playing fields of times past and chooses as a result to lift up a holistic story that could have so easily been just another white boy wonderland. Of course, this made the ridiculously ableist and, quite frankly cuntish choice Holmes made in referring to Stephen Hawking as a "gargoyle" in a footnote a breadth from the end all the more grievously disappointing, as while there were certainly errors in editing that didn't quite rid of the text of repetitions or faulty organization, none of them straight up smacked of maliciousness.
Such is the reason for taking off a half star, but after being born aloft on a tale of glorious thought that really did prove worthy of being an "age of wonder," I did ultimately settle on leaving this five star rating as is. For while there is much one can say about how much kyriarchical British imperialism played a role in these seeming Renaissance polymaths who never needed to earn their bred or do their laundry, this text does capture that lovely interplay between the literary and the scientific that the most powerful of today's civilizations have suppressed due to how fiscally unrewarding such values are. The solution is not to bring back the genocidal think tanks of yore, but to ask our selves the question of, what do we wish to leave behind when the our sun finally dies and leaves our earth a pebble flung out spinning from the inexorable hand of time? Will it be trains of thought carefully sundered from one another and put to work for some arbitrarily designated and hoarded away profit? Or will it be incontrovertible proof that humanity was more than the sum of its intellectual parts?
Of all the books I added back in the day in an attempt to straddle between my (then) career of science and my (continuing) devotion to literature, this has been the most successful of the bunch. It's not the easiest read by far when it comes to the fields of literature, history, and science, and I do have to wonder whether the reprieve that the small typeface granted to my wrist was worth the strain put on my eyes. However, what Holmes achieves is, for me, the optimal mix between fact, context, theory, and, something that so little tried and so often go amiss when it is indeed attempted, compassion. What I mean by that last is the kind of authorial viewpoint that is so often shunted towards feminism, post-colonialism, or any sort of field of thought that takes into account the power structures impacting all sorts of publication and goes out of its way to qualify, rehabilitate, and revive. Thus the especial points paid to the self-governance and cultural relativism of the indigenous peoples of Tahiti, the inclusion of women in the scientific field in all their strictured accomplishments, and all in all a focus on science that reflects on the uneven playing fields of times past and chooses as a result to lift up a holistic story that could have so easily been just another white boy wonderland. Of course, this made the ridiculously ableist and, quite frankly cuntish choice Holmes made in referring to Stephen Hawking as a "gargoyle" in a footnote a breadth from the end all the more grievously disappointing, as while there were certainly errors in editing that didn't quite rid of the text of repetitions or faulty organization, none of them straight up smacked of maliciousness.
Such is the reason for taking off a half star, but after being born aloft on a tale of glorious thought that really did prove worthy of being an "age of wonder," I did ultimately settle on leaving this five star rating as is. For while there is much one can say about how much kyriarchical British imperialism played a role in these seeming Renaissance polymaths who never needed to earn their bred or do their laundry, this text does capture that lovely interplay between the literary and the scientific that the most powerful of today's civilizations have suppressed due to how fiscally unrewarding such values are. The solution is not to bring back the genocidal think tanks of yore, but to ask our selves the question of, what do we wish to leave behind when the our sun finally dies and leaves our earth a pebble flung out spinning from the inexorable hand of time? Will it be trains of thought carefully sundered from one another and put to work for some arbitrarily designated and hoarded away profit? Or will it be incontrovertible proof that humanity was more than the sum of its intellectual parts?