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16th out of 50 books
—
152 voters
A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change
by
John Glassie (Goodreads Author)
This is the vivid, unconventional story of Athanasius Kircher, the legendary seventeenth-century priest-scientist who was either a great genius or a colossal crackpot... or a bit of both.
Kircher’s interests knew no bounds. From optics to music to magnetism to medicine, he offered up inventions and theories for everything, and they made him famous across Europe. His celebr...more
Kircher’s interests knew no bounds. From optics to music to magnetism to medicine, he offered up inventions and theories for everything, and they made him famous across Europe. His celebr...more
Hardcover, 273 pages
Published
November 8th 2012
by Riverhead Hardcover
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A first rate example of how to write a popular book about a little known person. Well worth the read for what it tells about the milieu out of which contemporary science emerged. Someone needs to do this for Samuel Bochart.
A fun, readable book about one the most brilliant, eclectic, and perhaps fraudulent men ever to grace the Earth. In an age where people can become famous simply for acting the part of a celebrity on a television show, it is nice to know that even in the intellectual maelstrom of the 17th century such people could arise. This judgement of Athenasius Kircher, however, may be a bit unfair. Although Kircher's main purpose in life seems to have to become famous, this German Jesuit, who dabbled in suc...more
John Glassie’s biography of seventeenth-century thinker Athanasius Kircher takes us to a time when knowledge, religion, and the occult were closely entwined. It’s hard to imagine the breadth of Kircher’s investigations. He translated Egyptian hieroglyphics, viewed blood cells through an early microscope, theorized that medicines worked through magnetic action, established a famous museum, demonstrated that a sunflower seed could act like a clock…and much, more more.
Well, some of this was so. Gl...more
Well, some of this was so. Gl...more
John Glassie is no scientist, but that may make his book more potent to those unaccustomed to looking at the world from a behind the lens of a microscope. His subject, Jesuit scholar and polymath Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), is a titanic of prescientific thinking, a quintessence of the (unintentionally) hilarious limits of any knowledge not based upon independently verifiable data. To paraphrase Glassie, Kircher, by being fantastically wrong on practically every serious problem he attempted t...more
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This is the vivid, unconventional story of Athanasius Kircher, the legendary seventeenth-century priest-scientist who was either a great genius or a colossal crackpot . . . or a bit of both.
Kircher’s interests knew no bounds. From optics to music to magnetism to medicine, he offered up inventions and theories for everything, and they made him famous across Europe. His celebrated museum in Rome featured magic lanterns, speaking statues, the tail of a mermaid, and a brick from the Tower of Babel....more
Kircher’s interests knew no bounds. From optics to music to magnetism to medicine, he offered up inventions and theories for everything, and they made him famous across Europe. His celebrated museum in Rome featured magic lanterns, speaking statues, the tail of a mermaid, and a brick from the Tower of Babel....more
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway.
John Glassie has written a fascinating biography of one of histories forgotten early "natural philosophers." Father Athanasius Kircher was a Jesuit priest more interested in investigating the wonders of Nature than in the pursuit of, what at the time (1602-1680) would have been the normal function of one of his Order: the conversion of heathens to the One True Faith. Kircher had a boundless curiosity in all phenomena and investigated just about everything...more
John Glassie has written a fascinating biography of one of histories forgotten early "natural philosophers." Father Athanasius Kircher was a Jesuit priest more interested in investigating the wonders of Nature than in the pursuit of, what at the time (1602-1680) would have been the normal function of one of his Order: the conversion of heathens to the One True Faith. Kircher had a boundless curiosity in all phenomena and investigated just about everything...more
This book was a slow-go for me. Let me say at the start, though, that was not the fault of John Glassie. His writing is smooth and he does a competent job of fleshing out Kircher’s life and career.
My problem was the subject. I wasn’t far into the book before I decided Kircher was a mix of charlatan and buffoon, as it appears many of his contemporaries saw him—Peiresc, Descartes and Redi among them. And yet he obviously had a remarkable mind and was capable of grasping finite principles which sci...more
My problem was the subject. I wasn’t far into the book before I decided Kircher was a mix of charlatan and buffoon, as it appears many of his contemporaries saw him—Peiresc, Descartes and Redi among them. And yet he obviously had a remarkable mind and was capable of grasping finite principles which sci...more
The book provided wonderful insight into the early modern scientific era, when thinkers were moving from Aristotelian-based approaches to science to more empirical methods. While Kircher perhaps represents a strange and winding back road off the great highway of knowledge, Glassie's biography wonderfully explained the intellectual world in which Kircher worked. And while many of Kircher's ideas were zany (e.g., the cat organ and that infamous sunflower seed), his books inspired a generation of g...more
The 17th century may have been the beginning of the Modern era, but that transition was not without considerable struggle. Galileo figured out how the Earth rotated around the sun, and was convicted of heresy and placed under house arrest. "Science" as we understand it was as much speculation as research. Witch burnings were the order of the day. into this conflicted time comes Father Athanasius Kircher of the Company of Jesus, and he soon becomes one of the most published authors of his day. Th...more
This book is an easy-to-read, entertaining biography of Athanasius Kircher. Kircher was a 17th-century Jesuit priest who was truly a "Renaissance Man". He studied all different subjects, and wrote a large number of hefty books on a wide range of subjects, including magnetism, music, optics, medicine, geology, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and China. He made several inventions, and was perhaps the first person to use a microscope to study microbes.
Kircher had a huge influence on culture and science dur...more
Kircher had a huge influence on culture and science dur...more
Probably more a statement on me and my state of mind than the book itself. The blurb is fascinating and I can see by the reviews that the gentleman in question was one of great interest. I just couldn't get into it, personally.
It was ok - it was billed as funny and endearing, but I didn't find it to be all that funny. What was interesting was how the author explained how the Age of Reason came to be, and how erratic and non-linear that process was. I wish there had been more detail about historical events - but it was a science book, after all...
This was interesting though I sometimes found the author's sarcasm annoying. But he clearly appreciates Kircher even if he finds him ridiculous at times. I can appreciate the voraciousness of his appetite for knowledge.
A Man of Misconceptions took me to the cozy interconnected world of 17th century of intellectual Europe. But can there even be said to be such a thing as an "intellectual" Europe, when even luminaries such as Rene Descartes pondered the question of whether a sunflower seed could power a clock because of its tendency to turn toward the sun? Athanasius Kircher was one of history's greatest social climbers. He also possessed boundless curiosity, enormous intelligence, exceptional self-regard and as...more
Crazy or brilliant? Kook or erudite? From what I've read from this book, the answer to the identity of Athanasius Kircher is "yes". From Germany to France and from Italy to Egypt, this man that I'd never heard of was at the forefront of the 17th century revolution in the acquisition of knowledge about the natural world.
It was a good book about an odd time in history between the movement from the middle ages to the scientific revolution. Fun for someone who likes history of science but I am not sure it is engaging enough for someone who doesn't.
Really interesting!
The history and the people surrounding Kircher are more interesting than the Subject of the book. While a talented linguist, and a curious mind, most of his energy was completely misdirected. Most of his work was subjective, unscientific, egotistical, and often plagiarized. He may of had a keen mind, but his ego prevented him from seeing the actual strides by the giants of his day.
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| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Science and Inquiry: Biography of a great priest/scientist/genius/crackpot | 10 | 64 | Apr 07, 2013 11:44am | |
| History, Medicine...: UPDATE the plague, the microscope, the snakestone and more | 12 | 45 | Mar 07, 2013 04:58pm | |
| The Imprinted Lif...: The story of a great and colorful priest/scientist/genius/crackpot | 6 | 7 | Nov 11, 2012 08:35am | |
| Goodreads Authors...: Hardback giveaway ends October 29 | 2 | 8 | Oct 28, 2012 05:27pm |
I'm the author of a book about a colorful but largely forgotten seventeenth-century scholar and priest named Athanasius Kircher. It's called A Man of Misconceptions, and it's being published by Riverhead Books in November of 2012.
I've been a contributing editor for The New York Times Magazine and have written for many publications including The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Atlanta...more
More about John Glassie...
I've been a contributing editor for The New York Times Magazine and have written for many publications including The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Atlanta...more
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