The Woman Behind Bridgerton Would Like to Explain Those Controversial Remarks

“The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behind brainpickings.Tom Hanks’ Debut Novel Is Here. “These chapters on Dickinson are among the most compelling biographical pages I have ever read, rendering me incapable of closing the book … The final chapters on Rachel Carson were so moving that I cried for thirty-odd pages … When Popova quoted Carson on great books, “something that would raise you a little higher than you were yesterday, something that would make you willing and able for your part in the work of the world”, I knew that I had one such book in my hands” “I can’t pull myself away from Maria Popova’s mesmerising new book Figuring … With glorious writing, storytelling, gems of insight and unique literary range, she tenderly brings to life celebrated scientists and artists we always thought we knew but really didn’t, and illuminates the fine threads that connect us all.

“Ambitious, challenging and somewhat category-defying” 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.Įmanating 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.

Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists – mostly women, mostly queer – whose public contribution has risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience and appreciate the universe. 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 catalysed the environmental movement.

Figuring maria popova