Figuring

Good God, even the list of contents is giving me goosebumps. (It's a list of contents and also a narrative poem.)I think I've waited my whole life for this big yellow taxi of a book.'Figuring' is biography with a difference. Maria Popova's subject is life, as well as lives. The lives she illuminates are dozens, spanning centuries, and she touches upon hundreds more, in a vast web of relations. A web of genius! The thrill of making those connections, as a reader, between one extraordinary human being and several others is reason enough to get hold of 'Figuring'.Last month I told the two most intelligent people I know about Maria Popova's weekly online posting,'Brain Pickings'. Both said they were already signed up. 'But of course,' I thought. For where else would those magical thinkers go, if not to the heart of what matters, in science and poetry, in 2019 and in any time, in lives and in life? Well, 'Figuring' is a sustained, expansive fruit from the same brilliant tree. Read it if you like 'lives', or biography, and love life. Read it if you admire - or miss - greatness. Read it and grieve as well as sing. (I promise you, you'll also sing.)

How do I begin to explain this book..If you know about or are a reader of brainpickings.org then all I have to say is that this book is like a lengthier version of that. Popova curated facts and ideas from an array of people who are as varied as humanly possible. The whole idea for the book is wonderful really, and I'm not using that word out of some sort of habit but because I mean it... I've been a fan of the blog for yearsss and I always check for emails that alert me of the next blog post, so much that it's become part of my routine.I loved how this book was put together. I found myself highlighting and marking almost every one of the 500 + pages because the words were just screaming their relevance at me.. if that even makes sense. (I wish I had read the ebook just so that I could share my highlights with everyone).Some phrases can be a little mind-bending and you find yourself reading the same thing 3 times just to make sure you really take in the meaning, but it's worth it.I really have no way of summarising this book, therefore I will only say that I recommend it wholeheartedly, especially to readers of the blog. I also recognize that it can be a little hard to digest at times because while the prose is beautiful it can also make meaning a little bit harder to grasp. I personally love staring at a sentence and reading it out loud a few times not just because I like what I read in terms of facts but also because the language used is wonderful.I've been reading passages from this for months now. It’s the kind of thing you can take your time with and also the kind you can revisit as often as you want because those words never stop being relevant.I'm just gonna leave some quotes here (they are from the start of the book, where we are being given a short introduction into what's to follow and the questions that led to the creation of this book):“We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels, and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance[....]We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves. Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life:What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love? Two Nobel Prizes don’t seem to recompense the melancholy radiating from every photograph of the woman in the black laboratory dress. Is success a guarantee of fulfillment, or merely a promise as precarious as a marital vow? How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections—between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and a particular place, between the interior world of each pioneer and the mark they leave on the cave walls of culture, between faint figures who pass each other in the nocturne before the torchlight of a revolution lights the new day, with little more than a half-nod of kinship and a match to change hands.

I'm 1/3 of the way through this book and adore it so much I am not sure I can do it justice in a review. I wish I could give it 10 stars. It is absolutely beautiful.It has introduced me to a huge variety of historic figures I had heard of but couldn't tell you a thing about (I can now!), and new historic figures that are rarely mentioned in school or popular culture but formed a movement of thought that changed the world. It draws out themes in life, love and death and offers new perceptions for living through them. I've been inspired, touched, shocked, and educated, all in Maria Popova's wonderfully lucid prose. Her writing surely adds her to the ranks of philosophers and creators she writes about - she has perfectly articulated ideas far beyond my comprehension and made them not only accessible but poetic and certainly memorable.I have simultaneously found it hard to put this book down, and also hard to pick up because I just don't want it to end! Whilst I think it is wise to approach any biography of the dead with an awareness of the author's bias, and I am not well read enough to contradict anything said, I do believe this is an excellent basis from which to go and find out more and use as a reliable reference point.Ultimately, this book has had a very personal, and profound effect on me, on my belief in myself and my aspirations, my perception of my place in the world, and what it means to be alive.

I love literature, reading, writing. I wanted to love this book so much. But i didn't quite - she is a great writer but sometimes overwrites and makes connections that are a little too far fetched. If you love the blog, still worth giving it a shot but don't have too high expectations

A book that seeks to link the lives of scientist, Maria Mitchell, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, poet Emily Dickinson and environmentalist Rachel Carson while also linking in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman is an ambitious one to say the least.It seeks to solder those links though the themes of 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 but struggles to maintain a clear and unified narrative, slipping in tenuous connections where there are none and struggling at times to bring out a single coherent story.Nevertheless this is a fascinating book, full of useful insights and pen pictures that kept me captivated to the end. As a history of extraordinary but unconventional women whose pioneering work out-shone their male counterparts and opened up new vistas for humanity, it was well-written, compelling, interesting and informative.