In the forty-five years since the publication of The Edge of Objectivity, historians of science have established a full-fledged discipline. He views science as the progressive development of more objective, detached, mathematical ways of viewing the world, and he orchestrates his characters and ideas around this theme. And throughout the book, Gillispie pushes an argument. Full of wry turns of phrase, the book effectively captures people and places. Gillispie is unafraid to rate Mendel higher than Darwin, Maxwell above Faraday. Even at six hundred pages, the book is, as the title suggests, an essay. The Edge of Objectivity is pointed, opinionated, and selective. The Edge of Objectivity arose out of this course. From start to finish-Galileo to Einstein-Gillispie introduced the students to the key ideas and individuals in science. In the mid-1950s, a young professor at Princeton named Charles Gillispie began teaching Humanities 304, one of the first undergraduate courses offered anywhere in the world on the history of science. The history of modern science is portrayed here as the development of objectivity through the study of nature. From Galileo's analysis of motion to the theories of evolution and relativity, Charles Gillispie takes us on a masterly tour of the world of scientific ideas.
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and i thought special topics was fine, just a little too cheekily stylized for me, and a little hyperactive and referential in its prose. i might have said this once or twice or a dozen times on the internet. i am a tough judge of books that claim to be like The Secret History. but it was a Very Big Deal at the time.Īnd it was a book that i personally thought was just okay. Good lord, remember marisha pessl? she of Special Topics in Calamity Physics fame? remember the immense fawning hordes of fans and the praise surrounding that book? you might not, it was 7 years ago and all. The last time he got close to exposing the director, McGrath lost his marriage and his career. Though much has been written about Cordova's dark and unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself.ĭriven by revenge, curiosity, and a need for the truth, McGrath, with the aid of two strangers, is drawn deeper and deeper into Cordova's eerie, hypnotic world. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley's life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive cult-horror film director Stanislaus Cordova-a man who hasn't been seen in public for more than thirty years.įor McGrath, another death connected to this seemingly cursed family dynasty seems more than just a coincidence. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. On a damp October night, 24-year-old Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. The pictures he shares from this period reveal their own story. John (Allman was unimpressed), drink beers with The Marshall Tucker Band, hang out with Jackson Browne and spot Eric Clapton watching them play a free concert in Miami Beach. But as a chronicler of the band’s exuberant rise and tragic dissolution, however, he is fabulous.Īllman beautifully re-creates the rock scene of the mid-’60s as the brothers’ various bands move from regional clubs to national venues like the Fillmore. (The story begins with the murder of his father in 1949, the victim of a carjacking gone wrong, when Gregg was 2 and his brother, Duane, was 3.) And he isn’t especially adept at describing how he and his brother developed their signature musical style (“The more I did, the more I learned”). Maureen Ryan's Hollywood Takedown Book Storms to Top of the ChartsĪs narrator of his private life, Allman is uneven - honest but not particularly insightful. |