PDF Figuring Audible Audio Edition Maria Popova Natascha McElhone Random House Audio Books
Download As PDF : Figuring Audible Audio Edition Maria Popova Natascha McElhone Random House Audio Books
Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.Â
Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists - mostly women, mostly queer - whose public contribution have risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience, and appreciate the universe. Among them are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art; the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson.
Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman - and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry, and transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement.
PDF Figuring Audible Audio Edition Maria Popova Natascha McElhone Random House Audio Books
"I don't think I've ever reviewed a book I haven't finished yet, but I feel compelled to fan the flames of this incredible offering. This book, Maria's Muse, is at once (from the first deliciously long sentence): Captivating, Inspiring, Eloquent, Whimsical and Deeply Satisfying. Like beholding and having the first taste of an authentic 11-course Chinese meal, I'm swooning with anticipation of the delights to come. As a fan of "Brain Pickings" I sense what I'm in for, yet also feel certain I'm poised for a transformational experience amidst Ponderables, Ideas and Catalystic Tidbits."
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Figuring Audible Audio Edition Maria Popova Natascha McElhone Random House Audio Books Reviews :
Figuring Audible Audio Edition Maria Popova Natascha McElhone Random House Audio Books Reviews
- Let me start by stating that I am in love with Maria Popova. I heard her at the 92nd street Y last year, and read Brain Pickings every Wednesday and Sunday. I am a fanboy. Thus I eagerly awaited Figuring. The book attempts to establish intellectual songlines of a diverse group of scientists and poets, mostly women, over some four centuries.
The problem with the book (I am giving up on it at p93) is that most of the connections are slight at best; something along the line of... "and could it be merely coincidence that X and Y both use the conjunctive "and" in their writing, and as far as we can determine, both put salt in their soup, thus prefiguring FDA guidelines by a century...
What seems to work well in short pieces which gesture at intellectual congruence falls apart in this more extended format, becoming a sort of intellectual ADHD.
I will continue to read this most gifted and thoughtful author, and am sorry the current work fails me (clearly it hasn't for other reviewers)
If anyone wants a pristine copy I will send it to you for the price of postage--you may have better luck. - And I have only read the first paragraph, three times.
- The first sentence alone is worth the price of this beautiful work of art. I read it over and over, and then typed it up and sent it to a friend. I'm going to commit it to memory, it's that breathtaking. This book is a treasure. Thank you, Maria Popova!!
- I’ve never felt more grateful for the existence of a writer. This book is about science, humanity,love, ideas, beauty. There is a refreshing alignment of science with art, in that science is essentially organic art- that is if we judge art to be what inspires. And, it’s about the precious vulnerable smallness we get to feel when astounded by the wonder of the big sky of the anatomy of a daffodil or the upending of love. Maria Popova brings the scientist’s of wonder to life, especially women scientists, who are otherwise unknown (zest least to me). Maria Popova is a scientist of human hearts. She she holds out, with great care, for us to see, what is sweet and tender in the hearts of these greatest of minds. By humanizing their greatness, she lets us see the beautiful in every human, in myself. A main theme is beauty - the people she writes of are driven to genius when awestruck by beauty. And the theme of beauty is within Maria Popova’s gorgeous writing. Very gorgeous, inspiring, and a sense that every word is infused with profound respect and love for her subjects and for the ideas. You’d figure a book about science, poetry, history, love, and everything else human, would get bogged down. It doesn’t. It’s the smoothest read. It feels graciously offered.
- I don't think I've ever reviewed a book I haven't finished yet, but I feel compelled to fan the flames of this incredible offering. This book, Maria's Muse, is at once (from the first deliciously long sentence) Captivating, Inspiring, Eloquent, Whimsical and Deeply Satisfying. Like beholding and having the first taste of an authentic 11-course Chinese meal, I'm swooning with anticipation of the delights to come. As a fan of "Brain Pickings" I sense what I'm in for, yet also feel certain I'm poised for a transformational experience amidst Ponderables, Ideas and Catalystic Tidbits.
- I have been a subscriber to the author's website for many months, and look forward to her superb essays, complete with long and interesting quotations and carefully chosen illustrations.
In a very positive sense, her essays are very similar to the long, thoughtful and yet heavily quoted reviews that were standard fare back in the 1840s and 1850s in the United States.
She has read and reviewed books online for over ten years, and almost every book was checked out of the public library.
She hits the ground running with the very first sentence "Whoever requires the suffrage of others, has at once placed his life in the power of calculation and of chance; to such a degree, that the labours of calculation cannot secure him from the accidents of chance, and the accidents of chance cannot exempt him from the pain of calculation."
And continues in full stride analyzing the thought "When, in the midst of ... attacks, the person of genius pays no attention to this ferocious mob of nobodies, “they consider this silence proof of their superiority.†The persistent existence of these patterns, De Staël argues, is evidence that while glory may be thus dependent on its contemporaries, fickle as they are in their favor, genius transcends the turbulences of current opinion and passes into a wholly different realm of significance unmoored from the tyranny of the present moment ... "
Wonderful reading, wonderful analysis, a true pleasure in many senses of the words.
Robert C. Ross
February 2019
A short example from her current mid-week offering
“For old people,†Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.†But who is the person staring back at us from the mirror as the decades roll by? The mystery of what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of changes is, after all, one of the most interesting questions of philosophy. Perhaps the greatest perplexity of aging is how to fill with gentleness the void between who we feel we are on the inside and who our culture tells us is staring back from that mirror.
That’s what beloved writer Grace Paley (December 11, 1922–August 22, 2007) addresses with extraordinary humor and intellectual elegance in a 1989 piece titled “Upstaging Time,†found in Just As I Thought (public library) — the same indispensable nonfiction collection that gave us Paley’s astute advice to writers. - A soulful and stunning dance of philosophy, art, science and life lessons. Masterful and poetic.
