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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A really good book,
By
This review is from: The Nobleman and His Housedog: Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That For (Hardcover)
What an appaling title! It is difficlt to imagine how anybody could create enthusiasm about a book about Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.
I bought this book at a used book store as a curiosity and it sat on one of my bookshelves for the last few months. The title has no impact but I had glimpsed something about its contents. Nothing about the external covering of this book or the way in which the internal illustrations or plates are presented illuminates how good the book really is. It has an overall drabness about it that I can only attribute to the publisher. The subject matter is hardly riveting and I have ignored the book for some time because I expected it to be drab. What a mistake! Ms Ferguson has a writing style that makes reading a story about 16th century astronomers and mathematicians run like a detective novel. I loved this book! I give it five stars but even though I think the presentation is lack lustre and the fact that her explanations of Kepler's work are not too clear. The diagrams relating to Kepler's work are poor and you really have to have some other understanding of his work to understand why Kepler is important to modern understanding of the universe. This criticism aside, I think Ms Ferguson does a magnificent job of portraying the lives of both Tycho (pronounced Teeko - thank you for this) Brahe and Kepler in a way that makes them appear human. These are names I have known almost my entire adult life but it takes a work like this to make them human. I did find a bias towards Brahe but I don't think there is anything wrong with that. I would have to read her other works to see if she has some kind of bias to nobility (I jest). I can best describe this book as a 'rare treasure'. It really is the kind of book that you can curl up by a fire on a cold night and read from cover to cover. I am a scientist and I love reading books about the history of science but rarely have I found such a well written and engrosing book as this. I give it 5 stars even with the lack-lustre (I originally wrote poor - but that would be unfare) presentation. This is not to say the way that chapter structres are not good - they really are. I think Ms Ferguson has done a great job, Its just that the final presentation is a little dowdy. It has to be asked "why would anybody write about such an obscure subject?" and "why would anybody read it?" I can answer these questions with the simple statement that reading this book leaves one a much richer person. I will certainly be looking for some other books by Ms Ferguson - I hope they are as good. Originally, I gave this book 4 stars because of the presentation but, picking it up again, I realise how much I really enjoyed reading it. The mark of a good book is when you wish you hadn't reached the end. This is a book I wish I had never finished.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Two Biographies for the Price of One!,
By Mark Pfennigstag (California, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Nobleman and His Housedog: Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That For (Hardcover)
Johannes Kepler, early in his career, served as assistant to the famous and prominent Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe during the final 18 months of Brahe's life and labors. This is the story of the young mathematician and the aging astronomer, and the tensions in their brief relationship, as well as what came before and after their collaboration.The "housedog" reference in the title comes from Kepler himself. It is how he describes himself, a commoner from a family of modest means, in the early days of his partnership with the nobleman Brahe. The detail the author provides in the individual histories of the two - Kepler and Brahe - and in the circumstances of their meeting and subsequent collaboration is impressive. This is the British edition of this biography of two of the greatest of the Renaissance astronomers. The book is published in the US as "Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens" with a more attractive cover and internal design. Students and enthusiasts of the histories of the sciences will find either edition of this book both entertaining and enlightening. K. Ferguson is an outstanding biographer, and writes in a surprisingly entertaining and easily readable style.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful book on a fascinating pair of scientists,
By
This review is from: The Nobleman and His Housedog: Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That For (Hardcover)
Although I knew the general outlines of the story of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, this book really fills in the fascinating story of these two great astronomers, who filled the gap between Copernicus and Newton, in moving Astronomy from vague assumptions and imprecise measurements, with complex, arbitrary and ill-fitting models, to a simpler, precise and accurate theory, which survived into the 20th century. Even Einstein's radical theory leads to only minute variations in the predicted behavior of the solar system from Kepler's laws, based on Brahe's observations, and Newton's tie in to gravitation. A great read.
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