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Title: Leonardo: The First Scientist by Michael White ISBN: 0-312-27026-7 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.8 (10 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: pushing it too far
Comment: This is an odd book. I think that it's main problem is that it is a popular science writer who is trying to say something original as well. While I by no means wish to disparage gifted amateurs from pursuing their own investigations, that kind of formula tends to work better when the writer first and foremost a specialist, on the caliber of SJ Gould, which White clearly is not.
White's contention, in concentrating on Leonardo's investigations, is that he was in fact acting as a scientist, perhaps the first modern one: using direct experiment to test theories that he was formulating. While Leonardo was certainly doing this, it all depends on how you define science. If it is experimentation to validate and change your mathematical theories, OK. But if you mean participating in a community that shares a larger theoretical foundation and then communicating your results for a kind of peer review, which Kepler and Galileo did, Leonardo most definitely was not a modern scientist: he kept his notebooks to himself and feared plagarism almost paranoically.
Unfortuantely, White leaves the definition unclear and so turns his book into a strange kind of anacronistic exercise. If you focus on the work on others, you can argue that many were "the first modern scientists." Some hundreds of years before Leonardo, the builders of gothic cathedrals appear to have had geometric concepts (math), which they carved into massive stone by trail and error (experiment), and they also had an overarching highly logical intellectual system, scholasticism, that was adaptive and very rich. Why not argue that they were the first real scientists?
Moreover, it is not even clear that White wants to systematically argue that Leonardo was "first," but merely that he was a pioneer. Does it even make sense to argue such a thing? What does it really add? We all know he was a genius who was largely self-educated and hence did not share the aristotelian assumptions inherent in scholasticism. But Leonardo was not systematic: with the exception of his great anatomical studies, he jotted thing down most things privately and in code, so you really have to interpret a lot of things heavily to find meaning in them.
Nonetheless, this was the first bio I read of Leonardo and it was quite interesting. Indeed, it gave me an appetite to seek more on him, though I would go for his art and engineering in the next go. It covers many of the standard details adequately and is written clearly, even beautifully. When the author speculates, which I think he does far too often, he at least makes it clear that that is what he is doing.
Recommended as a starting point.
Rating: 1
Summary: A Load of Misinformation
Comment: Seldom have I read a book that purported and looked as though it could be of interest and been so disappointed - perhaps I should have realised from the very title, insofar as most interested people rate Roger Bacon as the 'First Scientist'. The main point is however, that Mr White having conceived what he must of thought was a good idea then proceeds to regurgitate all the hoary old rhubarb that most truly interested observers consigned to the bin in their kindergartens. It is also, so dispiriting to read yet another unresearched comment about the likes of Ludovico Sforza and Lucrezia Borgia and others; and to find the chronology wrong and even some of the dates. I have not read any of Mr White's other books but I am amazed that a publisher of the quality of Little Brown should put its name to a book that overtly suggests it is authoritative but, quite clearly, is a tuppenny comic - they should be ashamed of themselves...unless of course, it is a spoof(?)...in which case it falls short of the mark on that score too.
Rating: 2
Summary: Tabloids from the 16th century!
Comment: While Micheal White's book does serve as an interesting introduction to some of the biographical history of the iconoclastic Leonardo, White includes so much subjective narrative following up the context of each chapter that he turns the "total man" goal of his study into a hyperbolic and titillating read that could very well have been lifted from the "Milanese Inquirer", if such a tabloidic rag existed so long ago! Hey, it probably did! But do we have to pay [money] for a ... Italian rag? All right, I'm no writer, but I would hate to have read this book as cliff note version for class and then had my semester grade riding on the final exam. If this is what you're thinking, don't do it! Leonardo would thank you if he could...
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Title: Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (Helix Books) by Michael White ISBN: 073820143X Publisher: Perseus Books Group Pub. Date: 01 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
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Title: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (Volume 1) by Leonardo Da Vinci ISBN: 0486225720 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 June, 1970 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Leonardo: The Artist and the Man by Serge Bramly, Sian Reynolds ISBN: 0140231757 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton by Philip Kerr ISBN: 1400049490 Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA) Pub. Date: 28 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Lost Discoveries : The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--from the Babylonians to the Maya by Dick Teresi ISBN: 0684837188 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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