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Summary
Summary
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.
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.
Reviews (4)
Guardian Review
"We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins." Maria Popova is best known for her insightful and eclectic website Brain Pickings, an exploration of what she reads and "a record of my own becoming as a person". Her first book is also a highly original survey of life, love and creativity; an intellectual odyssey that challenges easy categorisation. It interweaves the "invisible connections" between pioneering scientists, artists and writers - many of them gay women - to create a richly patterned tapestry of ideas and biographies. Her approach subverts the idea that lives "unfold in sensical narratives". Popova's unique act of "figuring" in this book is to create resonances and synchronicities between the lives of visionary figures. Her aim is to answer questions that "raze to the bone of life", including the most profound of all: "How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?" Popova writes beautifully, translating abstractions into sensuous, evocative subjects, turning history and science into symphonic prose poetry. She begins with Johannes Kepler, "perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived", a man who would "quarry the marble out of which classical physics would be sculpted". From Kepler, who dared to imagine space travel in the 17th century, Popova journeys on to another "soaring mind", Maria Mitchell, who observed an eclipse in 1831 aged 12 and became America's first professional woman astronomer. Next comes Margaret Fuller, whose 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century "lit the Promethean fire of possibility for women", followed by the sculptor Harriet Hosmer and poet Emily Dickinson. She concludes with a moving portrait of the marine biologist and environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose writing showed that "science could be a literary subject". In Carson's life and work the key thematic strands of Popova's book crystallise, for Carson showed how the sciences "came together in a holistic understanding of nature". As Carson said, you cannot "write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry". Popova's great achievement in this book is similarly holistic. At a time filled with urgent questions about identity, sexuality and the environment, she brings together science, poetry, philosophy and gender politics to find answers. As Virginia Woolf realised, the solution lies in the connectedness of everything: "the whole world is a work of art ¿ we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself". At more than 500 pages, Figuring is perhaps overlong: but as Popova notes at the end, this is the distillation of a lifetime's reading on science, the arts and biography. As Melville said, "it is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject". To read Figuring is to be immersed in a gloriously ambitious symphony of ideas that segues effortlessly from Einstein's "happiest thought" (occasioned by a man falling from a roof and leading to the general theory of relativity) to the "richness and complexity" of Dickinson's poetry, to Carl Sagan's moving description of the Earth viewed from deep space as a "pale blue dot" amid the cosmic darkness.
Kirkus Review
The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behind brainpickings.org, looks at some of the forgotten heroes of science, art, and culture."There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives," writes the author at the outset. She closes with the realization that while we individuals may die, the beauty of our lives and work, if meaningful, will endure: "What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust." In between, she peppers thoughtful, lucid consideration of acts of the imagination with stories that, if ever aired before, are too little known. Who would have remembered that of all the details of the pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler's life, one was racing across Germany to come to the aid of his widowed mother, who had been charged with witchcraft? The incident ably frames Kepler's breaking out of a world governed by superstition, "a world in which God is mightier than nature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity," and into a radical, entirely different world governed by science. That world saw many revolutions and advances ahead of the general population, as when, in 1865, Vassar College appointed as its first professor of astronomy a woman, Maria Mitchell, who combined a brilliant command of science with a yearning for poetry. So it was with Rachel Carson, the great ecologist, whose love for a woman lasted across a life burdened with terrible illness, and Emily Dickinson, who might have been happier had her own love for a woman been realized. (As it was, Popova notes, the world was ready for Dickinson: A book of her poems published four years after her death sold 500 copies on the first day of publication.) Throughout her complex, consistently stimulating narrative, the author blends biography, cultural criticism, and journalism to forge elegant connections: Dickinson feeds in to Carson, who looks back to Mitchell, who looks forward to Popova herself, and with plenty of milestones along the way: Kepler, Goethe, Pauli, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne.A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova's many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her many more. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The ever-curious thinker behind the celebrated website Brain Pickings, Popova brings her hunger for facts and zeal for biography to this exhilarating and omnivorous inquiry into the lives of geniuses who bridged the scientific and poetic. At the start of this passionate and erudite pursuit of truth and beauty, Popova describes the strange sight of a small red leaf twirling in midair, a gravity-defying mystery solved when she discerns the fine-spun spider's web holding it aloft. This image cues the reader to the structure of this many-threaded net connecting such barrier-breakers as the brilliant astronomer Maria Mitchell; radical writers Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, and Rachel Carson; and the too-little-known sculptor Harriet Hosmer, most of them women-loving women. Popova presents uniquely discerning and strikingly candid interpretations of her subjects' writings, private and published, and profiles their family, lovers, and peers, including Mary Somerville, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ada Lovelace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Sand, Frederick Douglass, Florence Nightingale, and Lise Meitner, among many others. Popova also chronicles sustaining same-sex relationships and the furors her subjects ignited, traces hidden strands of influence, and recalibrates the underappreciated impact women have had on culture and science. Writing with an ardor for language and musing on chance, affinity, and our fear of change, Popova constructs an intricate biographical cosmos that is intellectually scintillating, artistically wondrous, and deeply affecting.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
Library Journal Review
The early 19th-century transcendentalists included many extraordinary individuals, the most famous being Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But they are merely supporting characters in this queer-, female-centric narrative from Popova (A Velocity of Being). This work features astronomer Maria Mitchell (familiar to readers of Dava Sobel's The Glass Universe); poet Emily Dickinson; marine biologist and environmental author Rachel Carson; and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who takes center stage, in stories strung together through a series of both weak and strong associations. Selections also touch on the lives of contemporaries such as educator Mary Peabody, who coined the term transcendentalism, and sculptor Harriet Hosmer. Among all the pieces, Carson's story, however, reads like an entirely different book in the same series. Similarly, the first chapter on astronomer Johannes Kepler is a bit out of place and serves only to introduce Mitchell. Moreover, Popova's attempts to imitate writers she admires with her stream-of-consciousness style is ultimately distracting and sometimes irrelevant. VERDICT Despite its flaws, this hidden gem of a work will enthrall readers seeking underrepresented voices in the history of science and literature.-Cate Schneiderman, Emerson Coll., Boston © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.