Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Chatelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and...

It is difficult enough to write engagingly about someone who died over two hundred years ago; David Bodanis has written an excellent history not merely of one interesting person but of two: Emilie du Chatelet and her sometime lover Voltaire. In a narrative spanning (in detail) nearly two decades, in which Voltaire's fortunes rose, sank, rose, sank, and rose again and in which Emilie herself underwent tribulations both common (failed love affairs) and uncommon (struggling to create a place for herself amongst the first rank of European thinkers), Bodanis succeeds admirably in engaging our interest and sympathy.Most readers are unlikely to be familiar with the oppressive manners peculiar to the Courts of Louis XIV and his even more amazingly doltish son Louis XV; Bodanis gives us what we need to know in order to make sense of the maze through which Voltaire so frequently stumbled and through which the much more quick-witted Emilie navigated with efficiency.Likewise we are given enough context to follow the twists and turns of these twinned lives, without feeling either that Bodanis is patronising us or providing unnecessary embellishments. It's a tour-de-force of delicate writing that allows the reader to sail along on the current of Bodanis' painstakingly assembled knowledge, all the while growing deeper in our attachment to the two central characters. This is the more remarkable in that Bodanis shelters us only a little from their failings. Voltaire is shown as vainglorious and weak; Emilie can be glimpsed as being rather too intense for most mortals to cope with. Yet together they made sense of the world and of each other, and the reader feels genuine pity and sadness as their relationship gradually changes. The fiery intensity of their first love, combining as it did intellectual fireworks with physical glories, fades to the embers of mutual affection and understanding. Perhaps the finest testament to Bodanis' skill as a narrator is the fact that Emilie's premature death from childbirth, when it comes, is deeply moving. At that moment, something wonderful was taken from the world and Bodanis' skill lies in making us feel that loss even after the passage of two and a half centuries.Bodanis' touch is sure and slips only twice, on small technical matters. The exposition on Liebenitz' method to solve the problem of curvature is probably more confusing than helpful, and would be easier to understand in the normal language of calculus. And when Emilie cleverly purchases, for a lump sum, the rights to future tax revenues this is described as the first instance of derivatives trading whereas in fact it's an example of using net present value (of a future income stream) to determine the correct present price of an asset (or in this case, a lower-than-correct price, to ensure that the nimble Emilie can make a handsome profit from the intellectually indolent aristocrats who owned the rights to tax the French populace). But these are tiny cavils and in no way detract from this marvelous little book.For anyone curious about Voltaire (the man who brought us Micromegas and Candide), the birth of the Enlightenment, and the extraordinary person that was Emilie du Chatalet, this is a book that must be read for both pleasure and education.

The book came quickly and is in great condition.

A few years ago, Alan Palmer published a biography of Marie-Louise, Napoleon's second wife and Empress of France, arguing quite correctly that famous women of the 18-19th century are often ignored by biographers and seen only through the lens of the famous men in their lives. He then proceeded to write a book that was 90% about Napoleon, Metternich, and other famous men. David Bodanis hasn't been quite as egregious, but his book is essentially the same: Despite all the claims of placing the woman at the center of the narrative, it is in fact Voltaire, the famous man, who is still the focus. Whenever the narrative covers their time apart, Voltaire almost always gets more space.If that were the end of this book's problems, then it would be forgivable, for there is still much that Bodanis reveals about Emilie de Chatelet that makes for interesting reading. But in fact Bodanis is so woefully inadequate as a historian, and so out of his depth as a narrator of this period, that "Passionate Minds" becomes an almost non-stop howler.Bodanis has virtually no conception of the politics and wars of this conflict-ridden period; neither who was fighting whom, nor where nor how. So in a narrative whose characters are frequently in the midst of war, Bodanis makes innumerable embarrassing errors. He "compensates" (if that is the word) by trying to be very, very cute. So he reduces the French cavalry charge at Fontenoy to "pampered nobles" gallivanting for fun. He seems not to know what a regiment was, misunderstands the famous "Potsdam grenadiers" of Prussia's Frederick William I, and creates an "Austro-Hungarian Empire" more than a century and a half before such a state existed.Bodanis tends to invent liberally to cover the gaps in his understanding. He tells us that Voltaire left Prussia because Frederick the Great made homosexual advances upon him. (Not true.) He does not seem to know why the War of the Austrian Succession happened, nor all of the nations involved, and so he writes that fighting in the Low Countries in the 1740s was simply a French need for "revenge."His understanding of 18th-century economics is only marginally better. When describing Emilie's scheme to sell tax-farming futures, Bodanis doesn't appear to understand that the French government (along with many others) was already in the business of speculating on future revenues, as part of its increasingly wild schemes to raise revenues on borrowed time as the aforementioned War of the Austrian Succession wore on and threatened to bankrupt the state. Rather, Bodanis has this happening at the instigation of his protagonists, because Emilie was clever, and the tax-collectors were "dim." (218).In his attempts to explain class-privilege, Bodanis almost always indulges in contempt and sarcasm, ignoring even the evidence in his own narrative that demonstrates how 18th century aristocrats viewed service to the state and of course, patriotism. His is a bourgeois teleology in which all thinkers who proposed systems we nowadays consider normal, must have been martyred, forward-thinking heroes, morally superior to those "dim" "pampered nobility."I am not a scientist, so I don't know if Bodanis has mangled the descriptions of science as badly as he mangles politics, war, society, and economics. To a layman like myself, his descriptions of the scientific experiments - while redundant - were adequate. For this contribution alone, I give the book a second star, since one does not often think of Voltaire as a person who dabbled in science, with or without the help of his brilliant mistress.In fact, Bodanis' favorite themes are to extol the British and the middle class, at the expense of the French and the aristocracy - a sort of amateur history in which the good guys are pre-destined to win. His ignorance, however, prevents him from giving a balanced treatment even if he wanted to. For instance, Bodanis spends two pages trashing Louis XV (whom he describes as a "dolt"), for showing up to command the French army and doing a mediocre job of it... without any mention that Britain's King George II had done exactly the same thing - with equally poor results - two years earlier in the very same war.But that sort of balanced analysis wouldn't be as much fun to write. Bodanis prefers instead to Hollywoodize his protagonists and their era, talking down to his readers as if they couldn't understand concepts unless they were reduced to banal oversimplifications and then dressed-up in cheap-shot humor, embellished with fiction to glue the mess all together.Who knows. Maybe Voltaire would have loved it. But Voltaire would have at least done his homework.

This is a feast of information about 18th century France, particularly as experienced by the upper classes. As a scientist I was shocked and angered never to have been taught about Emilie du Chatelet, perhaps the greatest mind of her time and place. The details about Voltaire's life after her death were moving and fascinating. I remember the dramatic story as if I had been living it with them.

This is a wonderful account of one of the great women in history who no one has ever heard of. Not only was she a brilliant scientist, but she inspired Voltaire to become the man we are familiar with. Bodanis is a terrific writer. You learn about the intrigues of 18th Century France, and the intimacies of the extraordinary relationship between Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet. If you enjoy this book--or even if you don't, by all means read my favorite Bodanis books: The Secret House and The Secret Garden. It will change the way you see the world. Highly recommended.

This is an interesting book but I honestly did not like the way it was written. It seemed very light and that it was not researched well. As the reader I felt that much of the subject matter was glossed over and really had no sincere interest by the author. I felt cheated of a good read and learning.

This book gave me a fascinating piece of history that I was completly uninformed on. It is fascinating learning the details regarding life in a period that is completly foreign to our culture. It is also fascinating to find out the contributions that women made in science at a time when it was believed that women were completly ignorant, and every effort was made to keep them so.

One of my favorite books!