From Publishers Weekly
Modern readers are less inclined than earlier ones to sit through Copernicus's juggling of Ptolemy's epicycles to discover how he arrived at his eureka moment that the Earth moves around the Sun. Fortunately, they don't have to, as Vollmann, whose Europe Central won this year's National Book Award for fiction, provides a highly personal and philosophical gloss of all six chapters of Copernicus's De revolutionibus (1543). Vollmann interrupts his exegeses with discussions of the contemporary mindset, the limits of observation at the time (we're told repeatedly how difficult it is to spot Mercury without a good pair of binoculars) and the scientist's quiet, provincial career. What seems most remarkable about Copernicus's book after reading Vollmann's version is how firmly his work is based on Ptolemy's. It's also striking how close he came to modern astronomical values, especially since he thought that arriving within 10 degrees of a true value would be an amazing achievement. Vollmann can't completely avoid technical explanations, but readers who want to understand the significance of Copernicus's book in both his own time and ours will find this the next best thing to reading it. 20 b&w illus. (Feb. 6)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Booklist
Vollmann is a man of many words steeped in history and guided by a fertile imagination. Best known for his expansive novels, including the magnificent National Book Award-winning Europe Central (2005), he now offers an energetic, piquant, and contextually rich exegesis of The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in which the sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Copernicus attempted to prove that the sun was at the center of the known cosmos, not the earth. Vollmann works his way through Copernicus' often flawed arguments and calculations, fuming and joking and marveling. Reminding readers that Copernicus made his radical discoveries long before the invention of the telescope, Vollmann writes with vigor and poetic insight about the evolution of science as "observation slowly overcomes intuition." A rewardingly candid thinker, he is particularly rigorous and wry in his discussion of the conceptual, political, and moral struggle between religion and science. In conclusion, Vollmann praises Copernicus for having the good sense to die shortly after the publication of his paradigm-altering work, thus avoiding the cruel punishments then accorded heretics. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
