Figuring / Maria Popova.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Popova, Maria, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women in science--History.

Women in science.

Women and the arts--History.

Women and the arts.

History.

Local Subjects:

Women and the arts--History.

Women in science--History.

Genre:

History.

Nonfiction.

Physical Description:

x, 578 pages ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Pantheon Books, [2019]

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 contributions 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."--Dust jacket.

Contents:

Only the dreamer wakes

To find dismooned among the stardust

What is lost and what is gained

Of the infinite in the finite

To figure and transfigure

The much that calls for more

To brave the light of the world

That which exhausts and exalts

Merely the beautiful

Divided, indivisible

Between sinew and spirit

Between art and life

The banality of survival

Shadowing the light of immortality

To gaze and turn away

From romance to reason

From terror to transcendence

Unmastering

The heart's circumference

Bound by neither mind nor matter

In the darkness of being

Searching for totality

Into the unfathomed

Where splendor dwells

To live and to vanish

Between the scale of atoms and the scale of worlds

Between the time of monarchs and the time of stars

Tracing the thread of being

From shoreless seeds to stardust.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 549-552) and index.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9781524748135

1524748137

9781786897244

1786897245

OCLC:

1041202358