Maria PopovaRezensionen

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this ARC!

This is one of those books I want to own and have a copy off on my shelf and give to people I love. They truly do not make anthologies like this all that often; which is, to say, that it is absolutely wonderful.

Maria Popova has put together a beautiful collection of poems that are interesting and really good, and accompanied each with a concept to be explored. She herself, writes beautifully, like a poet writing prose, each word saturated with love. She reminds us of the beauty and imagination in science, a field that has often been called cold because of its focus on rationality.

I would put her in the company of some of my favourites like James Crews and William Seighart, and I can't wait for the next collection she puts together; although I should tell her that the bar is incredibly high now.

I would never recommend a poetry collection to my grandmother, who has much better taste than I do in literature, but this is one I would not hesitate to give her. I know that compliment might not mean much to someone, but it's the highest one I can give.

The illustrations by Ofra Amit were also a lovely touch!

A well deserved, and easy, 5 stars!

"In the stillness of reading, the silence save for the sandpapery sound of my fingers turning the page, I was born. In the quiet of a summer afternoon spent in a hammock, of a winter night spent sneaking under the covers with a flashlight, dawned the awareness, slow but unmistakable, that I was not alone."
-Dani Shapiro, page 50

This book is just what it claimed to be- a collection of letters by various well-known (and some not quite as well-known) readers to younger readers. It is what I might label as a coffee table book; it's an imposing size, has a beautiful cover, contains beautiful artwork inside, and doesn't have to be read in order. Each spread had a letter on the left page and an accompanying illustration on the right page.

For me, it was much more than the kind of book you buy just to impress guests by keeping it in a prominent spot in your living room. Since the title says the letters are written to a "young" reader, I was not quite as young as the intended audience. But the letters I found within helped me feel understood as a young adult reader. Some of the letters I loved the most were those by Laura Brown-Lavoie (page 18), Dani Shapiro (50), and Pamela Paul (218).

Popova's The Snail with the Right Heart has a little bit of everything beautiful in it. A lovely story about how both physical and gender diversity is an amazing part of our natural world.

Jeremy is a land snail and as such is a hermaphrodite. Super cool but perhaps more compelling is that Jeremy has a rare gene causing a mutation of 'situs inversus'.

Do read The Snail with the Right Heart to benefit from Popova's knowledgeable, sweet and optimistic outlook on our world. And to experience happiness from Ping Zhu's bright, warm, welcoming and friendly illustrations.

A Velocity of Being is a wonderful collection of letters written by writers, performers, celebrities and others about their own experience of reading, about their own love of reading and about how important reading has been in their lives. The letters are addressed to young people and offer plenty of encouragement to read, read broadly and read more.
Each letter faces a wonderful picture that illustrates the points made in the letter.
Both the artwork and the letters are worthwhile on their own, but combined they create a wonderful, inviting and memorable book.
My personal favorite was the illustrated story by Chris Ware, a story about reading a book, turning it up unexpectedly decades later and then preserving it to pass along to someone else. It is a charming, heartwarming and enchanting story and is alone worth the time to read this wonderful volume.

يتتبع الشبكة المعقدة التي تربط شخصيات مهمة عبر التاريخ، من الشاعر الألماني فون غوته والمخترع نيكولا تيسلا إلى أول عالمة فلك أمريكية ماريا ميتشل والشاعر رالف والدو إيمرسون. تلتقط بوبوفا نسيج هذه الحيوات المختلفة وتقتفي أثرها التاريخي، كاشفةً عن القوة الدافعة التي توحدهم جميعاً.
لقد ترك العديد من الشخصيات التاريخية المهمة موروثات تتفرع بطرق مفاجئة وغير متوقعة، وتتصل مع أشخاص آخرين من تخصصات وأماكن وأزمنة مختلفة. أدت هذه الروابط أحياناً إلى تغيير ثقافي كبير، واكتشافات علمية وابتكارات رائدة. من علماء الفلك إلى الشعراء، ومن السياسيين إلى المخترعين، فإن القوة الدافعة التي تربط العقول العظيمة في التاريخ هي سعيهم المشترك لإدراك الجمال والحقيقة.
الحقيقة هي أن صدى الحياة يتردد في اتجاهات عديدة ولفترة طويلة بعد الرحيل. في هذا الكتاب، نتابع هذه الأصداء ونكتشف كيف تتشابك حياة بعض الشخصيات التاريخية بطرق غالباً ما تكون مفاجئة.

This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever held in my hands. I may or may not have hugged it (yes, I hugged the book) after reading the first few pages. I bought it as a birthday present from me to me and I am now savouring it slowly, and I am sure I will re-read the letters and look at the art regularly. Just beautiful.

Easily the best nonfiction I have read in the last year. I knew next to nothing about Mitchell, Fuller, and Hosmer. What I thought I knew about Dickinson and Carson was pretty threadbare. The echoing storylines might annoy some readers, but I love this sort of thing. Also ends up being a powerful chronicle of triumph over archaic constraints.

I didn't finish it, cool cover, cool idea, some of the stories were interesting. But it was annoying most of the time. The best historians I've read traced an idea through time, she did none of that. She had very clearly read a lot about her main protagonists, and in regular life, read a lot of modern authors but not in the intermediate years. So it was a lot of "someone did something in the 18th/19th century" then "300 years later, so and so said something was very vaguely related"!!! :O :O !!!. Over and over

But honestly, what pushed me over the edge was when she talked about Feynmann. For no real reason she gave the early love+life about Feynmann, how his young love contracted a disease and wasted away before his eyes, so they got married in her last few years of life. Really heart-wrenching, I hadn't heard that about it before. But she makes this whole big deal about how this "paragon of logic", in his grief years later, wrote a heartfelt letter to his dead wife wishing she was there. It was such a touching letter. But the author is aghast that a 'man of science' could entertain such 'non-logical beliefs'. So little compassion for him, compared to her main protagonists, I had to put it down.

I learned this before but now am more certain - if a back cover talks about the author as a 'polymath', it's a major red flag, it's usually just a book where they try to show off how much they have read and can quote. I did buy the audiobook so maybe I'll revisit, but I doubt it

Edit: Apparently I'm not the only one. I saw it again on the 'clearance book section' for the books that they want to sell out and then not rebuy½

I saw this on a bookstore shelf, and with Maria Popova of Brain Pickings as the author, and an odd geometric-looking drawing on the cover, I bought it without reading the blurb, assuming it would be a dive into some interesting corners of mathematics or science. I was completely wrong, but I'm not the least bit disappointed.

This is a remarkable, unique, multiple biography, focused on a number of women mostly from the 19th and 20th centuries, each of whom made significant contributions to science, poetry, journalism, art, and more. Many of the subjects are not well known now, although all were famous and celebrated during their lifetimes. It's interesting in that it focuses as much or more on the human relationships of each subject as it does on their contributions. Many (most, I think) of the women seem to have been lesbian, queer, or otherwise non-conformant with heteronormative expectations. Unsurprisingly, this often led to sad or even tragic outcomes.

Those leery of poetry should know that the book spends a good chunk of attention on the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, especially her epic poem Aurora Lee, and also on the work of Emily Dickenson. It definitely revived my interest in both of those authors, neither of whom I've read in many years.

This book begins with an unforgettable image, that of the mathematician and astronomer, Johannes Kepler, racing through the night to rescue his mother, who was being tried for witchcraft. From there, Popova sets off on a wide-ranging look at a variety of things, from asking how it is that genius arises to examining how people negotiated lives outside of the traditional heterosexual framework in times when there wasn't even the language to speak about sexuality. At first the book seemed to be a scattershot of ideas and historical tidbits which, while interesting enough, do not make a coherent narrative. But Popova settles down into the meat of her book, a series of biographies of women, mostly living in the mid-nineteenth century, who lived extraordinary lives, far outside of the parameters allowed American women at the time.

Her subjects range from women who are now largely unknown, like Margaret Fuller and Harriet Hosmer, to household names like Emily Dickinson and Rachel Carson. Popova lets each woman's story speak for itself, but she also is primarily interested in how each woman dealt with chronic health issues and how they negotiated love and relationships, which were often found outside of what was seen as acceptable at the time they lived. Margaret Fuller's life was the most revelatory for me; I'd never heard of her, despite her having been famous in her time and a woman who was able to forge an independent path for herself. Rachel Carson's story was also particularly well-told.

I'd recommend this book for anyone who likes an author to explore side trails and ask questions as they arise, or for anyone interested in the lives of women, early feminism, women in science and in how people negotiated love lives that were not traditional and heterosexual in the nineteenth century. I felt early on that this book was too episodic, but Popova had a plan and I'm glad I stuck with it. It's a book that gets more fascinating as it goes.

Maria Popova explores the realms of science, physics, astronomy, poetry, philosophy, art and the struggle of women to be taken seriously as academics and in all fields of serious endeavour. This book is the result of years of work and thought by a polymath. Who will write her story in the future?

A Velocity of Being is a wonderful collection of letters written by writers, performers, celebrities and others about their own experience of reading, about their own love of reading and about how important reading has been in their lives. The letters are addressed to young people and offer plenty of encouragement to read, read broadly and read more.
Each letter faces a wonderful picture that illustrates the points made in the letter.
Both the artwork and the letters are worthwhile on their own, but combined they create a wonderful, inviting and memorable book.
My personal favorite was the illustrated story by Chris Ware, a story about reading a book, turning it up unexpectedly decades later and then preserving it to pass along to someone else. It is a charming, heartwarming and enchanting story and is alone worth the time to read this wonderful volume.

Interesting pieces that didn’t quite come together as a whole for me.

Truly an amazing work. Popova's intellect is dizzying and a joy to read. Wholeheartedly recommend!

Rating of 4.85