What a fascinating story, about a woman I've never heard about before, but who we owe so much to, in science and math.

Excellent story, easy to read, and I had trouble putting it down.

A *very* novelistic biography. You've never heard of her, but she's the more central (and the more interesting) character.

Fascinating, great read.

hated it

An interesting book about the lifelong relationship between Voltaire and Emilie du Chatelet. Emilie was a mathematician and physicist who furthered understanding of Newton's work and expanded on it. Unfortunately, being female, her work didn't get the recognition it should have gotten at the time.

There are some great anecdotes in the book, imparting an intimate understanding of the daily lives (including the love lives) of numerous major and minor personages, and also an understanding of the intellectual life of Enlightenment Era France. Being Catholic and an absolute monarchy (supported by a powerful aristocracy, France at the time was an inhospitable place for intellectuals, who were likely at any time to be tossed into the Bastille for expressing unorthodox ideas.

My favorite anecdote concerned an English actor named Bond who, after failing to be cast in one of Voltaire's plays, rented a theater himself so that he could stage his own production and take on a coveted role. In doing do, he emoted so powerfully during his death scene at one performance that he actually died. The patrons and other actors weren't too put off by this. Actors clamored to play the role and patrons flocked to see the only play with the "Role that Kills." Voltaire was impressed and pleased.

My only beef with the book was with the writing. Often the sentences were awkwardly written, with multiple clauses that made the meanings of the sentences hard to parse. Also, the author, in his introduction, criticized a previous bio of du Chatelet, saying that since its writer wasn't a scientist, the import of du Chatelet's work wasn't highlighted sufficiently. Accordingly, Bodanis's intro led me to expect some cogent science writing, which this book doesn't really offer in any great quantity.

Still, fans of history and biography are likely to give this book higher marks than I. I take books like these as a kind of medicine. Some greens, roughage, and antioxidants to go along with the tasty fiction I usually read.