Category Archives: book reviews

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: The Confessions of Saint Augustine

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Someone will think me sacrilegious, but I couldn’t get into this one.

As I’ve said many times on this blog, a time of downsizing from our living circumstances is coming. As part of that, we need to get rid of about half of our 3,000 to 4,000 books. That number is after we have sold or donated many already. I figure well over 1,000 books are already gone. So in choosing books to read, I scan our shelves and try to choose something that looks interesting but is something I most likely won’t want to keep.

A number of our books are what could be called Christian classics. So a couple of months ago, when it was time to start a new book, my eyes fell on The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Written over 1,600 years ago, this meets the definition of Christian classic. I thought, it’s probably something every Christian should read. I started it in early 2023, read it on four days, put it aside, and picked it up again in late November last year.

Why did I lay it down after four days? Because I found it hard to read and understand. The book I read it in was translated by John K. Ryan. The original, of course, is in Latin. I suppose the readability will depend on the translation. Or is it possible that all translations can’t do more with the English construction than the original language gives you? I suppose I would need to read a different translation to find out.

Why didn’t I like it? Perhaps it’s due to passages like this one.

In truth, I should have wished, had I then been Moses—for we all come from the same clay, and what is man, unless because you are mindful of him?—I should have wished, if I had been what he was, and had been enjoined by you to write the book of Genesis, that such power of eloquence had been given to me, and such ways to fashion words that not even they that cannot yet understand how God creates things would reject my words as beyond my powers; while they who can already understand, no matter what true interpretation they have arrived at in their thought, would not find it passed over in your servant’s few words; and if some other man by the light of truth had perceived a further meaning, it should not fail to be understood from those same words.

And that’s just one sentence! The whole book is like that.

I found myself reading and not comprehending at all. The Confessions consists of thirteen books, each book broken down into multiple short chapters. I started each book with renewed determination to understand what I was reading. Alas, by the second chapter I would once again be reading the words but not comprehending.

When I was about halfway through I thought about giving up. But I pressed on. Sometimes the paragraphs put me to sleep; sometimes they were just incomprehensible. The main reading took me from Nov 29 to Jan 18. Rarely could I read as many ten pages at a sitting.

Well, this is quite a downer of a review. As you can tell, this book is not a keeper. But no worries: I have two more copies of it. Maybe, in a few years, I’ll pull out one of the others and see if another translation will be easier. But this mass-market paperback is going in the donation pile.

On to something else.

book reviews

Book Review: Darwin’s Life and Letters, Vol 2

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Mine was an e-book, downloaded for free. This wasn’t the cover available to me when I put the ebook together.

Twas not so long ago that I posted a review of the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 1. At the time, I said I was going to look and see if I had downloaded Vol. 2 and formatted it for Word. In fact, I had. I used the “Send to Kindle” app from Amazon and soon began reading it.

This volume covered the years from after the publication of Origin Of Species in 1859 to Darwin’s death in 1882. It includes a couple of appendixes, one listing Darwin’s publications: books, pamphlets, scientific papers, etc. In the same manner as Volume 1, the book is a mix of biography and letters. Darwin’s son Francis provides much commentary from personal experience. The letters, while extensive, are not more important than the biographical entries.

As this volume begins, Origin has just been published. The early part of the book concerns the next three years or so, when Darwin was being alternately praised and lambasted. Many people, including men or science, rejected Darwin’s findings. Some went partway, but others more or less said Darwin was a kook. Many of the letters are to two of Darwin’s best friends, Hooker and Huxley, both of whom took the lead in promoting evolution as a scientific reality. Another correspondent in this category was Asa Gray, an American.

As the years increased since the Origin was published, other subjects began to enter into the correspondence. Darwin had other books on totally different subjects that he published between 1859 and 1882. Many letters went out about these as he was conducting research, writing the books, dealing with the publisher, promoting the book, and discussing it with friends and colleagues. When it wasn’t bogged down with scientific names, this correspondence was quite captivating to me.

Occasionally, well, more than occasionally, the letters went beyond my comprehension. Here’s an example, from an 1860 letter.

The effect which the carbonate of ammonia produces is the segregation of the homogenous fluid in the cells into a cloud of granules and colourless fluid; and subsequently the granules coalescing, dividing, coalescing ad infinitum.

One thing that stood out to me was the almost religious nature of some of the letters, where evolution was the religions. Darwin frequently said things like, “Thank you for spreading our doctrine,” or “our doctrine has certainly caused reactions from many.”  Those aren’t quotes from the book, but represent how Darwin wrote to several people.

Reviews of Darwin’s books, especially the Origin, was a frequent topic. Some of his correspondents were those not favorable to his “doctrine”. He was always patient with them in his letters, as if hoping to convert them by persuasion.

So, after having read both these volumes, what do I conclude? I’m glad I read them. It helped to flesh out some understanding of Darwin beyond what they say in science books. I don’t imagine I’ll ever re-read these, however. I give a combined rating of 3.5 stars. It would be 5 stars except for organization, and the sacrificing of letter space in favor of biography.

book reviews, letters

Book Review: The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

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Abelard and Heloise, publishers may think your letters are interesting enough to publish, but I’m not going to waste any more time on them.

Given my love of reading letters, it should surprise none of my readers to know that I picked up The Letters of Abelard and Heloise for my reading enjoyment. I bought it used for 75¢. Good thing, too, given how the book turned out.

I had never heard of these two. Peter Abelard, b. around 1079, was a French philosopher. Schooled in the liberal arts, he fell in love with Heloise. She was from Paris. Somehow they met and had an intimate relationship. Surviving letters suggest he wanted to marry her, but she refused. Believing that marriage amounted to legal slavery or the wife, or that the wife was essentially nothing more than a gold digger, she wrote to Abelard:

God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore.

That’s quite a statement to put in print, but that’s how she felt. His reward for her being his mistress was castration by a mob employed by her uncle. Before that, they had a child together. After his mutilation, he became a monk and she a nun. For the rest of their lives they lived apart. Abelard established a convent and put Heloise in charge of it. They rarely met after their going into religious orders, but exchanged a number of letters. These have been passed down to us.

My copy of this book, a Penguin Classic, includes a lengthy introduction, which was good to read, but was about twice as long as I would have liked.  Before the letters was an item Abelard wrote about his trials and tribulations. That item wore me out. The English translation from the original Latin was okay, but I didn’t find the story engaging.

Then I got to the letters. One from Heloise was first, the one with the quote above. Abelard responded, the Heloise to him—all long letters—and by that time my mind couldn’t take any more of it. I rarely give up on a book, but I did this one. I quit on page 139 of 295.

I’m not going to hang onto this book in hopes I’ll read it in the future. I have too many books, and too few years left, to keep reading books that don’t hold my interest. 2-stars for this one.

book reviews, Carlyle, letters

Book Review: Carlyle Letters Online

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Regular readers of this blog (all two or three of you) know that I love letters. Not just to receive them, or write them, but to read them in historical collections. Some years ago, I acquired electronic files of Carlyle’s letters with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Somewhere I picked up a print copy of one of the two volumes, and then a print copy of other letters of his.

The Carlyle Letters Online is a project I’ve used frequently, with many hours of pleasurable reading and research.

From an internet search, I learned about the Carlyle Letters Online. This is a project to put all of the letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle online in a searchable and highly usable database. This followed the print edition of the letters, which took place from 1970 to 2023, is composed of 50 volumes.

The online version began in 1999. By that time, many letters by the Carlyles that had escaped earlier detection and collection had been found. The number of letters in the online collection is over 9,000 in all, more by Thomas than by Jane.

This review is really only over the first ten volumes of the online collection. which cover the period from 1812 to 1838. I have no idea if I will ever get to the other 40 volumes. In fact, I confess to not having read every letter in Volumes 1, 2, and 3. At that time, I was trying to find letters about specific topics. Beginning with Volume 4, I have read every letter in each volume. It’s taken me a few years to do this, reading one or two letters many nights right before going to bed.

Many of the letters are to family members. Though Carlyle was a man of letters, in the volumes I’ve read, there weren’t many letters to literary men. There were some, of course. By 1838, Carlyle was just starting to gain a following. Soon his circle would expand and include more than Emerson, Mills, and Sterling. I’m anxious to get into those letters.

Thomas often writes in typical Victorian language: flowery, hard to understand, complicated sentences, many references that are now obscure. Sometimes the letters were hard to understand, at least beginning to end. He used a lot of private references we would call coterie speech.

A sample of how using the index works. Very useful and efficient.

Fortunately, the CLO has copious footnotes on many subject, making the obscure more understandable. It also has a good indexing system. A few years back the index showed on each letter—links to the items in the letter that were indexed. Type about anything Carlyle-related in the index and it brings up results with links to the letters you’ll find that item in. The illustration with this paragraph shows an example of references to one of Carlyle’s less well-known essays.

I don’t know how much time I’m going to put into reading these letters for a while. After finishing Vol. 10 I’m taking some time off from reading them. Oh, I still open the database from time to time and read a letter. I’ll get back to it in a bigger way, maybe next year some time.

While the collecting of the Carlyles’ letters took over a century, and is not over yet, it’s a massive project that has a very specialized audience. I don’t necessarily recommend people rush out and buy either the print letters or start perusing the online letters. For me, they are a source of pleasurable reading.

 

book reviews, poetry

Book Review: John Keats, the Making of a Poet

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The book title page and the frontispiece: a “Life mask” from 1816

In July, while looking around for a book to read—a book I would find interesting yet wouldn’t want to keep after reading, I saw on my bookshelves in the storeroom John Keats: The Making of a Poet. By Aileen Ward, published in 1963, this was perfect. It looked like  serious biography, the subject of poetry still holds my interest, and I didn’t think it would be a book I’d like to read twice.

Wentworth Place, where much of Keats writing took place.

Born in 1795 in London, son of a groom/stableman, Keats was one of the “Romantic era” poets. The last major one to be born and the first to die.  Before reading this, I knew his poetry and read some of it. I have, somewhere upon my over-stuffed bookshelves, a small volume that someone pulled together of best-known works, and a volume of his complete poems.

But I knew little about the man except about his tragic death from consumption at age 25. This book told me much about him. His father was a hard worker who opened a business for stabling the horses of travelers; he died when Keats was 9 and away at boarding school. His mother was a gadfly who quickly remarried upon her husband’s death, left the family for a few years, then returned in time to have Keats nurse her through the final stages of consumption when he was a teenager.

A sketch of Keats on his deathbed, 1821.

Keats took up the study of medicine and seemed to do well with it. He was at the point of launching into one of the lower-level medical sub-professions when poetry became his main interest. He began to write it and found he could do it. Alas, he fell under the influence of Leigh Hunt, who was roundly disliked by the better known literary critics. Hence Keat’s first poetry book, published in 1817 while he was still planning on a career in medicine, was also denounced by those same critics.

Despite this, Keats laid aside the medical field and took up poetry as his vocation. His long poem, “Endymion,” published and panned by the critics, is not considered a classic. According to Ward, many of his shorter poems were autobiographical, written about this or that person, or place, or event. The most famous of these is “On First Reading Chapman’s Homer”.

But Keats struggled financially, as well as in his health. He never received his full inheritances from his parents and grandparents, never earned much from his published poems, and lived without extravagance.

This biography does a good job of telling all of this, sometimes in almost too much detail. But it does keep moving and did keep my reading. I read about 10 pages a day in my noon reading time, in the sunroom our outside in the woods when the weather cooperated, and finished it in a little over a month.

I found the sources used by Ward and her way of spinning them into the story particularly impressive. Despite how old this is relative to our modern times (Keats died in 1821), it seems she was able to document close to every day of his life: when he wrote which poem and why; where he traveled; who he dined with; what his health was like at the moment. It helped that Keats left an extensive correspondence behind at his death.

I am so glad I saw this book on the shelf and read it. I rate it the full 5-stars. I’ll not read it again and it’s not a keeper. But learning about this little piece of poetic history has acted like a tonic in my reading life.

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: The Pilgrim’s Progress

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We started reading in this book, but…

The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan is a Christian classic novel/allegory that has been around since 1678 in part and 1684 in complete version. For some reason, while I knew about this for years, I never read it.

But a couple of months ago, while browsing my bookshelves for something to read, I found this. I suggested it to Lynda early this month and she agreed we should read this.

Let me tell you, this is a hard read! The subject matter is great; the language is archaic and quite difficult to read, especially aloud. It didn’t help that the book we had was a mass-market paperback from 1968 that fell apart less than halfway through. While we were out and about for a doctor’s appointment, Lynda suggested we buy a new copy rather than power through with the loose pages. So we bought a new one.

…it fell apart, given that it was 55 years old and cheaply made. So we switched to…

The problem was that the book divisions weren’t the same in the 1968 and the newer (2008 or later) book. Bunyan’s book has lots of marginal notes and scripture references. In the 1968 book, the marginal notes are printed as headings between paragraphs. In the new book they are in the margins. Once I was able to orient to the new system, the reading was definitely easier in the new.

…this newer book. Much easier to read (better font, cleaner pages).

For those who don’t know the story, the first part follows a man named Christian, who lives in the City of Destruction. He decides to go on “pilgrimage”—the allegorical word for he became a Christian. He “leaves” his wife and four sons for his journey. Along the way he encounters many problems. He walks with a huge burden on his back. He walks alone, though frequently encounters both those who would deter him from his goal and those who would help him to reach his goal, the Celestial City.

In the second part, Christian’s wife, Christiana, decides she has made a mistake by not going with her husband on pilgrimage. She leaves the City of Destruction with her sons and Mercy, a young woman from the town. Their journey is much different than Christian’s was. They are given a “conductor”—a man named Great-Heart who will help them on their way. Their party of seven (Christiana, Mercy, the four boys, and Great-Heart) heads on the journey. Their guide advises them where to go and protects them from many of the dangers. Their party swell with additional pilgrims.

Eventually they reach the river across-which is the Celestial City. One by one they receive a message via “post”, and are given the time when they must enter the river and cross to meet their king, the allegorical description of death.

As I said, the reading is difficult. Neither of our books had modernized text or punctuation. I did some modernization as I read, but it was difficult.

I’m not going to rate this classic. And, while I suspect I will never read it again, I won’t discard the new book. I’ll find a place for it on the shelf. But the older book is going into the recycling bin.

book reviews, family, Genealogy, History

Book Review: Letters From Muskoka

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The book is available in modern reprints. My copy was a free e-book of the original, out-of-copyright edition.

Some years back, after twenty years of searching, I finally “found” my maternal grandfather. I had a last name and diminutive first name, but no location. A few hints that my grandmother gave, along with DNA triangulation at 23andMe, and in August 2017 I finally confirmed Herbert Stanley “Bert” Foreman as the man, and his birthplace as Port Carling, Muskoka, Ontario, Canada.

The genealogy research went fast, as did finding cousins. The library at Port Carling was incredibly helpful with making copies of book pages for me. With the location being totally knew to me (now mainly a vacation area north of Toronto), I began to look for and acquire books about the area. The ones I got were available on line through Google Books as they were out of copyright. I downloaded four books, and the first one I read was Letters From Muskoka by “an Emigrant Lady”.

I read this several years ago, probably back in 2018, but, being somewhat less familiar with Google Books than I am now, I didn’t save it to my library there. Also, I find that I’m not as prompt at reviewing books I read as e-books, and hence I never reviewed it. This week, wanting to catch up on book reviews, I went looking for “that Muskoka book I read a few years ago” and didn’t find it. Fortunately, through a simple search I found it. In order to write a review of it, I had to give it a bit of a re-read. Mainly, I scrolled ahead to this haunting passage I remembered from the end of the main narrative:

I went into the Bush of Muskoka strong and healthy, full of life and energy, and fully as enthusiastic as the youngest of our party. I left it with hopes completely crushed, and with health so hopelessly shattered from hard work, unceasing anxiety and trouble of all kinds, that I am now a helpless invalid, entirely confined by the doctor’s orders to my bed and sofa, with not the remotest chance of ever leaving them for a more active life during the remainder of my days on earth.

What a sad commentary on her years there. She, a serviceman’s widow for fifteen years, and her adult children were Brits who were living in France when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. When the war ended in 1870, changes in the country made life there less attractive for these British expats. One daughter and family had emigrated to Muskoka, and most of the rest decided to follow.

When the book was first published in 1878 in England, the author was listed as “An Emigrant Lady”. Later editions identified her as Harriet Barbara (Mrs. Charles) Gerard King. She was a widow with four children, at least two adults. At the end of the war, they decided to emigrate to Canada to take up free land being offered in Muskoka. Harriet was 61 at this time.

They arrived in Muskoka, after a major ocean storm in transit, after train delays, after finding themselves without money, in fall of 1871. The hardships began almost immediately, and did not abate for the next four years. Here are other salient quotes from the book.

It was anguish to see your sisters and sister-in-law, so tenderly and delicately brought up, working harder by far than any of our servants in England or France.

We were rich in nothing but delusive hopes and expectations, doomed, like the glass basked…to be shattered and broken to pieces.

A portrait of Harriet, I suspect after she left Muskoka in 1876, more likely shortly before her death in 1885.

Normally I don’t have much sympathy for or interest in those who are, or think they are, part of the aristocracy. They have their good things in life and don’t need my sympathy. But it’s hard to read this and not have a little sympathy for the emigrant lady. In the last day or two, as I read on in the book, I learned that she was a writer and tried to bring income in by writing and submitting articles. At this, she was mostly unsuccessful.

The letters take up the bulk of the book, with a few ancillary sections. I’m not sure that I read beyond the letters. Mrs. King described in great detail the hardships in getting a farm cut out of the rocky woods. All family members saw their health deteriorate due to the hard work and the meagerness of the provisions.

The book did what I wanted it to do: help me to understand the area my long-lost grandfather came from. As I wrote this review, I can see I need to finish the last few short sections of the book. I’ll download it to my phone and begin reading it in the off moments. Then, when I’m sure I finished it, I have three other books about old Muskoka to read. So I’d better get on it.

Unless you have a connection to Muskoka, or you really, really like pioneer stories, there’s no point in reading this. For me, it was a great book. The detail and the quality of the writing make this a 5-star book—for me. For most people, it’s maybe a 3-star book. But, in the beauty of e-books, I’ll keep it in my library for a while.

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: The Darwin Conspiracy

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This is a novel that might appeal to some. The writing is good, but the plot suffers from needless complexity and, dare I say, some goofiness.

I’m not sure where we got it, but The Darwin Conspiracy by James Scott Bell has been in our house for a long time. I’ve been in writers conferences where Bell has been the keynote speaker or taught workshops, so I definitely wanted to read it.

It’s a novel, Bell’s first published novel, written in the 1990s when he was trying to transition from lawyer to writer. The plot is rather strange. It goes back and forth between the present day and times in the 19th century. Keeping them straight was difficult at first, easier at the end of the novel.

The premise is a document, called the Busby Manuscript. Sir Max Busby was the assumed name of a man who, as a boy, hated his father and killed him. He took on the name Max Busby and went to sea to avoid the law. The ship he sailed on was The Beagle, the same vessel on the same voyage that carried Charles Dawin on his famous round-the-world trip during which Darwin did the bulk of his formative research.

Busby sensed that the evolutionary theories that Dawin was just starting to develop would be disastrous to Christianity. Being an evil man, Busby wanted science to thrive and Christianity to suffer, and so egged Darwin on. As the story develops, Busby posed as an educated man (which he was not) and was with Darwin at every critical stage in Darwin’s work. Then he was with Darwin’s friends and every person who eventually touted the cause of evolution, right up to the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. Busby interacts with all the famous scientists and others who had a hand in either pushing evolution forward or fighting against it.

In order to accomplish this, Bell had to have Busby live to the age of 125+ years old. Not believable in the slightest, even in a novel where it is assumed you will suspend unbelief.

The book was complicated by 1) constant switching from present to 2) Busby writing his narrative in 1927 to 3) his days with Darwin and Darwin’s successors, a period of 90 years. Keeping these times frames straight was difficult, especially because often two were mixed in one chapter.

The novel was also complicated because Bell puts himself in it. He was the one who was given the Busby narrative by an old professor, only to lose it when the professor is killed, the police confiscate the narrative, and someone steals it from them. This whole scenario was, quite frankly, ridiculous. Having Geraldo Rivira make a cameo appearance was way over the top.

I rate this book just 3-stars. It would be two for the plot, but the writing is quite good and that pulls it up. But it is not a keeper. I don’t anticipate ever reading it again, nor recommending it to anyone else.

 

book reviews, Carlyle

Book Review: Mr. Froude and Carlyle

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This book claims Froude did a poor job on the bio he wrote of Carlyle, but could Froude be right and Wilson wrong?

I have been reading more and more and more books on my phone lately (my Nook having reached obsolescence a year ago). I’m always reading a print book, or two, but I enjoy the convenience of having the e-books available wherever I am.

One of these books I finished in May. Mr. Froude and Carlyle, by David Wilson. Published in 1898, seventeen years after Carlyle’s death, the book appears to have been written to counter the four-volume biography of Caryle that James Anthony Froude had written and published in the mid-1880s.

It seems that Froude, at least in Wilson’s mind, had been very hard on Carlyle. But that was only in relation to Carlyle’s wife, Jane. It seems that Wilson thought that Jane could do no wrong and Thomas no right whenever there was a dispute between them. Wilson didn’t like that. He took up each of those disputes and re-cast it as favorable to Thomas and negative to Jane.

I have not yet read Froude’s four-volume work. After having read Wilson’s book, I started on Froude’s but haven’t read very far into it yet. That Froude’s biography of Carlyle would be inaccurate is puzzling, since it was an authorized bio and Froude had access to all of both Thomas’s and Jane’s papers.

I found the book a bit comical. Wilson wrote it in a format something like this:

  • Froude wrote about this incident in 1848, indicating how Thomas treated Jane shabbily.
  • But I, Wilson, have looked into that incident and in fact it was Jane who was in the wrong.
  • How could Froude have been so far off the mark? He must have wanted to run Thomas down.
  • Oh, and Froude regularly redacted critical information from letters or journals. Shame on him.

I’m anxious to get further into Foude’s book to see if it’s as lopsided against Thomas as Wilson said. I began that book at Volume 3, because all of Wilson’s examples were in that time period or later. For the 60 pages I’ve read in it, I can find no fault.

This book by Wilson is something that would be of interest only to Carlyle scholars and amateur scholars, like me. It’s certainly not worth picking up and reading for anyone else.

book reviews

Book Review: Life and Letters of Charles Darwin

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Not a stellar book, but a good one.

Around twenty years ago, maybe a little longer, I discovered Project Gutenberg. Back in those dark ages, pre-Kindle, no one had yet manufactured and marketed a reliable and functional e-book reader. Creating digital copies of books back then was done using OCR scanning or, heaven forbid, retyping from print copies. But it worked. PG had, by the time I discovered it, a large library of digitized books. A whole library on your computer, at your fingertips! I was in heaven.

I downloaded a number of books in rich text format (Word format not being an option). One of those was The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 1. I loaded the RTF into Word and formatted it for compact printing but comfortable reading—a nice blend. I never printed it, however, not knowing when I might read it. In the last year I discovered a Kindle feature where you can upload any text file to your Kindle device. I tried that with several files, including this one.

A controversial figure to many, but certainly something worth knowing more about.

I wanted to read this because I’ve already read a fair amount about or by Darwin. I read Origin of Species about three years ago (reviewed on this blog). And many years ago I read Irving Stone’s The Origins. Plus I’ve read several other articles about him. So in May sometime, having finished other reading projects, I pulled this up on my phone’s Kindle app and began reading it. I set it down several times, finally getting into a rhythm of reading a good number of pages. I finished it about two weeks ago.

It’s a good book. Not stellar, but good. It was compiled by Darwin’s son, Francis Darwin. Volume 1 covers up to and including publishing The Origin of Species, but not his life afterwards. The book is more biography than it is letters. That was a downer, as I was looking forward more to letters than to biography. The bio portion was a little bit lackluster. Francis Darwin arranged this topically rather than chronologically. I generally prefer chronological biographies. So I found the biography portion generally uninteresting.

The letters were also arranged a little bit topically, though with a nod to chronology. The letters written from The Beagle, the boat Darwin sailed on his famous voyage around the world, were quite interesting. As were the letters in the years following that voyage.

The letters in the two decades between the voyage and publishing Darwin’s famous book were mostly good. Many included the scientific names of species Darwin was studying. Those were somewhat hard to read, but interesting if you could skim past all the names. All together, they told a story of a man who was sick most of his life, but still managed to get a fair amount of work done and publish things that the scientific community embraced, followed by the rest of the world.

This is a book I’m glad I read, but probably will never read again. I don’t remember if I downloaded and formatted Vol 2, but I’m not going to go looking for it right away on my computer. As for Vol 1, I give it 3 1/2 stars, marked down for the biology section, with the letters section not stellar enough to pull the whole book up to the 4-stars category.