It’s publication day for The Philosophical Breakfast Club! If you have not yet ordered your copy, now’s the time! You can read it immediately on the Kindle, Nook or PC, or if you buy it from your local bookstore.
I haven’t yet seen the book out in a shop. Leave a comment below when you have seen it in a window or on the shelves of a bookstore! Thank you!
A review in The Daily, the new magazine for the iPad, says that “Geeks, scientists, intellectuals, boys between ages 10 and 16 and all combinations of the above will leap for joy at Laura J. Snyder’s book. . . . We owe this quartet a lot (photography and mathematical economics, to start) and Snyder does a lively job of explaining why.”
Read the full review here.
A fabulous review in today’s New Jersey Star-Ledger says that “Snyder engagingly stakes out an era beginning with science as a hobby of vicars and the wealthy to its evolution as the engine of imperial growth, in no small measure due to the efforts of four who made common cause at breakfast.”
Read the full review here.
On Monday at 9am EST I will be talking about The Philosophical Breakfast Club live by telephone with Sean Moncrieff of Newstalk Radio, broadcast out of Dublin. You can listen in here.
A review in the February 12 issue of New Scientist calls The Philosophical Breakfast Club “a masterful portrait of nineteenth century science.”
The full-page review, written by Jonathon Keats, is titled “Ham, tongue and Bacon (!).” As the title suggests, the reviewer was struck by the fact that at their breakfast meetings the men discussed Francis Bacon’s work and then “spent their careers pursuing Bacon’s directive.”
I was so pleased that the author ended the review by agreeing with my claim in the epilogue of the book that “there would be justice in looking back at the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club for guidance on how to knit the sciences and humanities back together again.”
Keats writes, “[Snyder] is right, and . . . the boundless curiosity the four shared throughout their lives—about absolutely everything—is surely a beginning.”
Read the complete review here.
A nice new review on Amazon here by E. Bukowsky