Gleick's Newton
Yesterday I finished reading Isaac Newton, by James Gleick (Pantheon Books, New York, 2003), and I was quite impressed by it. Gleick managed to write in what I think of as a "high" tone, a slightly lofty rhetorical style, on the poetic side, and sustain it throughout the book. It's a difficult voice to maintain, but he did it well and it suited the subject.
This was certainly not a detailed, laundry-list sort of biography, nor was it a scientific biography as such. It was more of a character piece, a gesture drawing sketched with ideas. It's as though the concepts and discoveries emanated from Newton and then we saw how they affected the times and people around him, and this formed an outline, a silhouette of this intellectual giant.
Gleick said he wanted to try to place Newton in his time, and he that did very well. I felt as though I was privy to what Newton and his contemporaries were thinking — it was effective narrative. I enjoyed reading the book, and I came away with a much deeper appreciation of Newton than one might expect from less than 200 pages.
To end, a couple of quotations. These I don't mean to be illustrative in any general way; they were just bits that amused me the most.
The first one I take entirely out of context, but I thought the rhythm and diction was sublime. It is Newton he's writing about:
Ceaselss ratiocination disordered his senses. [p. 149]
In this second one, we meet Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal from whom Newton had obtained some vital data, but with whom he obviously later fell out. I particularly enjoyed the little twisting of the knife that Flamsteed manages at the end with his "againe":
Flamsteed took some small pleasure in reporting rumors of Newton's death [to Newton himself]: "It served me to assure your freinds that you were in health they haveing heard that you were dead againe." [p. 154, spelling original, emphasis added]