nice all read

--> Nonfiction Behold, the Medici moons GALILEO GALILEI: The Tuscan Artist By Pietro Greco, translated by Giuliana Giobbi 383 pp. Springer Reviewed by Marty Carlock If you want to know every minuscule detail about Galileo, down to his friends, correspondents, doubters, believers, acolytes and enemies – in the sixteenth century everybody who was anybody had blatant enemies – Pietro Greco is your man. If you want an easy read, look elsewhere. The book suffers from a spectacularly bad translation from Italian. It required some nimble re-translation as I read – becoming accustomed, for instance, to use of the word “realize” to mean “fabricate” or “develop,” as in, to realize a scientific instrument. Or to malapropisms like “the emergency of a new science.” Greco is an Italian science writer, educated as a chemist, editor of Scienza & Societ á and active in science education in Italy. The translator’s English is better than my Italian, but it appears she worked with a dictionary...

NONFICTION Not the movie ADRIFT A True Story of Tragedy on the Icy Atlantic and the One Who Lived to Tell about It By Brian Murphy and Toula Vlanou 162 pp. Da Capo Reviewed by Marty Carlock It’s not surprising that a book about the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the North Atlantic in 1856 and a film about a contemporary woman trying to sail boat singlehandedly should bear the same title. But what else can you call stories of determined survival on the sea? The hero of Brian Murphy’s Adrift – the book – is a New Bedford seaman named Thomas W. Nye. He shipped on the packet John Rutledge , out of New York bound for Liverpool, in the winter of 1855. The trip east, with the prevailing winds at its stern, was easy. But returning to the west – this is a sailing ship, hard to tack upwind – with the threat of winter ice, was a disaster. Murphy spends some time chronicling the history of the moment. The habit of leaving port at will, whenever the weather permitted and the craft h...

Nonfiction Renaissance woodsman THOREAU: A Life Laura Dassow Walls 615 pp. University of Chicago Press Reviewed by Marty Carlock Thought we knew all about Thoreau, did we? An idle, eccentric hermit who spent two solitary years in a hut at Walden Pond and wrote a book about it? And sometimes took the Alcott girls out to wander the Concord meadows and catch butterflies? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Thoreau was a graduate of Harvard College, a meticulous naturalist who contributed to scientific studies, was elected to natural history societies, knew Greek, Latin, German and French, and could read other languages. He studied and developed empathy with American Indians, conducting anthropological research before the term existed. He overcame his love of solitude to become a witty and popular lecturer and a fiery abolitionist speaker. A century ahead of American hippies, he became fascinated with Eastern religions and assembled a library of such writings. He was fond of machinery and insatiably cur...

Fiction I was born dead THE WHITE CRUCIFIXION By Michael Dean 256 pp. Holland Park Press Reviewed by Marty Carlock “On a highly auspicious day, the seventh day of the seventh month, I was born dead.” What an opening sentence! How can we not read on?   The narrator born dead is Moyshe Shagal, known to us now as Marc Chagall, painter of dreamlike fabulist scenes. The White Crucifixion is a fictional autobiography. The opening paragraph continues: “I was brought back to life by the midwife holding me in a tub of cold water, then lifting me out again. I went from black to blue to pink. Then a fire broke out.” According to this author, Chagall’s paintings refer to actual events in his life, and the figures painted, whether flying (some are) or grounded, are pictures of actual people. My painting of the scene, Birth , shows a claustrophobic single-room izba pressed down by a low crooked ceiling. By a red-canopied bed, a midwife is holding a baby. There is a proud father present, and a co...