DNF.
I think this author is too woke for me. He for whatever reason has to mention homosexuals and how they were treated in a book having nothing to do with the rainbow mafia.
I also don't think this woman is as important as he says. You can't trust woketards. And all this modern feminism is not feminism. How is allowing men on your sports teams to win all your trophies and show how weak women are in any woman's best interests...

I have no interest in this book.

This is a fantastic biography of Emilie du Chatelet and her lover, Voltaire. The book does a great job of describing French life in the 1700s, and shows how Emilie and Voltaire made their mark upon it.

Emilie's translation and extensions of Newton's Principia were partly responsible for France's dominance in physics, directly impacting Lagrange and Laplace. She also was the first to suggest that light may be a mass-less particle.

This book was a fun read, and I learned a lot about how European politics in the 1700s worked. That time period was the beginning of the enlightenment, and Emilie and Voltaire were on the cutting edge of that shift. This book gives a clear understanding of what that means, and how those two experienced it.

The topic is fascinating but the breathless prose was a bit much, and Bodanis is rather more sexist than I think he realises.

I think your rating of this book friends on what you want to get out of it. If your primary desire is to learn more about Voltaire, then I guess it's pretty good. If you want to learn what about Émilie du Châtelet and her contributions to science, like I was, then you may be left wanting more.

Accessible writing style. I enjoyed that he centered emilie and Voltaire’s love story rather than the technicalities of the science, math, and theory they were coming up with. The result is a very human story about an exciting time in history. This is also the first nonfiction to bring tears to my eyes by the end! Very enjoyable.

Very much a romance and less philosophy and opinions of the enlightenment. Emilie du Chatelet was a bright women ahead of her time but I think the novel points out well the class struggle prior to the Revolution. Unfortunately, it reflects on the turn around in American politics and the socioeconomic squeeze taking place now.

The personal story of Emilie du Chatelet and Voltaire got old pretty quickly for me. Although I am sure the author drew his conclusions about their motivations from extensive reading of their letters and other writings, these were glossed over superficially, and it gave the book a pop-psychology feel. The dynamics of the working relationship between the two was more interesting than their romance, especially for any of us who work closely with partners in our fields.

I was interested in the history of intellectual thought during the Enlightenment, and I think the book did a better job here. By using two individuals of opposite sex and differing socioeconomic backgrounds, he had a neat presentation format for how intellectual thought and natural philosophy began to change during this period, from the perspective of two minds actively involved in the change itself.

I found the references and reading suggestions at the end to be the most valuable; they are substantial, and well-defined by the author. I have a new reading list to go on from here.

I must admit I was a little skeptical at first, due to the word "scientific". I was afraid there'd be lots of science involved... in fact, while the science was touched upon, it wasn't overwhelming.

The book was an amazing read. Bodanis has a nice flow and he obviously knows a lot about the history involved. He's made great efforts (as you can see in the annotations) to use Voltaire's and Émilie du Chatelet's letters and words (albeit in translation where necessary).

I enjoyed not only the glimpse of their lives, well told and laid out - of their meeting and their live together. I learnt a lot about both of them, but not only them.

What makes this book so fascinating is that Bodanis keeps mentioning the situation around his two subjects - the view of France, of Prussia, of the world. It's immensely helpful to get a better understanding of what Voltaire's and Émilie's lives would have been like.

Tedious- didn’t finish it.

You are beautiful ~ so half the human race will be your enemy.
You are brilliant ~ and you will be feared.
You are trusting ~ and you will be betrayed.

Voltaire wrote this in the 1730s, shortly after meeting a brilliant woman of science (Emilie du Chatelet), who also became the great love of his life. Everything he wrote above came true for Emilie.

Voltaire became a different person after meeting her and she him. Voltaire is a household name partly because of her influence. Unfortunately, Emilie is not and she should be. She is mostly forgotten because it was too hard for men to reconcile her brilliance with her sex. You know that famous little equation of Einstein's? Well, she had a huge hand in that last little bit. She should be a name we all know as well as Voltaire or Einstein, yet we don't because she had a vagina. I could candy-coat it for you, but that's the real reason why she was dismissed from her rightful place in history. Though, to Voltaire's credit, he would be the first to tell you she was more brilliant than he was.

Emilie and Voltaire were both part of the French Enlightenment out of a dark age where the rich were considered superior over the poor and thus were above paying taxes - literally for centuries some families paid nadda in taxes in France. The dark ages were a time when prejudice was sanctioned and sexism was the norm. It was a time when women were more likely to be raped or beaten than allowed to get an education. It was a time when rich men were held above all others. They held all the cards and the laws worked only in their favor ~ everyone else be damned. The dark ages were a time when freedom of religion could get you killed and ones very sex or sexual orientation could be ones ultimate downfall or ruin.

Voltaire and Emilie were at the heart of ideas that later spurred on the French and American Revolutions. Hatred of these same ideas is at the heart of what groups like al-Queda and Isis are really waging war on. Ideas that say that diversity of religion should be respected, women should be treated equally, church and state should be separate, and that beliefs of the dark ages are not the sole path to the truth.

They both had the intellect and guts to stand in defiance of a "let them eat cake" monarchy and it almost cost them their very lives. They believed in the radical idea that free will and freedom were things to hold dear. They believed in crashing through the wall of their day's social order that favored the well-to-do above the masses. If they were in America today, they would be fighting mad as they would see quite clearly that too many in American politics are coveting dark age concepts. They would also see the irony of the masses buying what those dark age bastards are selling us today. They would be appalled in a way that not enough Americans seem to be.

Discussions of Newtown, Locke, Leibniz were lacking in context/depth, but a great job narrativizing Voltaire and Du Chatelet's romance with only first person letters in a light way. Pretty good job illustrating the nature of enlightenment transgression against prevailing social norms- i.e., any transgression fundamentally relies on what it trangresses, the invention of some new content can only occur in the illusory form of returning to the past original truth. It was also a very funny observation that Voltaire's satire of Leibnizian optimism is effected by his spats with Du Chatelet and Du Chatelet no longer being convinced by Newton's brilliance.

- Voltaire's Love Poems:
- “…Why did you only reach me so late? What happened to my life before? I hunted for love, but found only mirages. I found only the shadow of our pleasure. You are a delight. You are tender. What pleasure I find in your arms.”

“she came up with insights on the nature of light that set the stage for the future discovery of photography, as well as of infrared radiation. Her later work was even more fundamental, for she played a key role in transforming Newton's thought for the modern era.”

“Emilie raced in conversation, eyes sparkling, faster than anyone Voltaire had ever met. He adored her youth and intelligence (she was twenty-seven when they met), and she teased him for that; but she was thankful, deeply, that she'd finally found someone with whom she could let her intelligence pour forth. ”

“They galvanized such then unknown young men as Helvétius, d'Alembert, and Diderot, whose writings and edited volumes spread Enlightenment ideas even more widely.”

“A gentler critique came from the American academic Carl Becker, who concentrated on the way many Enlightenment thinkers seemed just to be transposing the religious ideals they'd been brought up with, even in their recommendations about ostensibly secular policies. As Simone Weil put it in a different context, it was as if they believed one could get to heaven simply by marching straight ahead.”

“Gabrielle-Anne was one of those once-beautiful women who forever remain unhappy in life, however wealthy they are. “I don't think that anyone ever saw her smile,” a regular visitor remarked, “except in a weary, condescending way.”

“The purpose, as every woman understood, was to get a man who, in the later immortal words of Dorothy Parker, should be wealthy, loyal, and dumb.”

"All Voltaire was really doing was giving his audience an outlet for their general discontents. Nobody, of course, took it as undercutting the whole system of kings and regents and court appointees, for no one in the audience felt they were living seventy years before the French Revolution. On the contrary, they were part of a world that had existed stably for untold centuries, where there was a royal elite on top of society, peasants at the bottom, and a strict class system safely holding all the parts in between together. To move to better positions within that system might be desirable, and to be reminded of how so many individuals blocked you was satisfying as well. But there was no thought of putting the system as a whole in question.”

“ In the late 1600s France had dominated the Western world: it had the greatest army, the greatest economy, the greatest architects and engineers and thinkers. But from the latter years of the 1600s, in a decay accelerated by the old Louis's vicious attack on all French Protestants, forcing his country's greatest entrepreneurs to leave, the country's apparent success masked a steady decline.”

“The trick was to be able to hold two views at once. The married Louis XIV, for example, would always stop his carriage when he passed a priest, and bow with full sincerity—even if he was in the carriage because he was heading off for an afternoon with one of his innumerable mistresses. All of France worked that way. Censorship, for example, was not a matter of either/or. There was an intermediate category of “tacit” censorship, where a work was somewhat illegal, but not strongly so: the author could publish a few copies so long as he was discreet. (Even the king's chief censor, in a later generation, temporarily used his own home to hide copies of a work he didn't want to be generally circulated, yet which he didn't want to be entirely destroyed either.) Marriage was a matter of financial and social alliance between families, and so long as that was respected, the natural passions that humans felt could be fulfilled without destabilizing the system.”

“The duel had to begin quickly, since the siege commander had at least ostensible orders to avert fighting among his own staff. Duelling had increased in recent years. Cavalry officers lusted for it, not least because they hardly ever got to use their swords in the charges they'd been trained for. (Those charges were becoming too dangerous when thousands of enemy infantry faced them with loaded muskets.) Also, more and more nobles felt they needed to defend their status, since ever more newcomers, such as Richelieu, were being brought into traditional, old-establishment ranks.”

“It was one of the fundamental acts of the Enlightenment, this questioning the bases of beliefs that had been held for centuries. There was a great bravery here, for almost every law and procedure in society ultimately depended on traditional religious beliefs. ”

“If country life could be made genuinely attractive—if the top nobles ever decided to leave this easily supervised clustering at Versailles— then who could say whether the centralized royal state would be able to survive?”

“The trick, Voltaire knew, was never to pretend an affection you didn't feel. Any intelligent person would see through that. Rather, you need to find what you genuinely do like about a person and then go ahead and share that.”
“1733 Pope had begun publishing his long verse essay titled Essay on Man”
- “Pope's content was clearly inadequate, and when the poem first came out, Voltaire and Emilie had laughed at how the poor Englishman had lived up to national stereotypes by forgetting to list passion as one of the motivating forces in life. But as a professional writer, Voltaire found it intriguing to see a tightly structured, very long poem that at least tried to carry through a systematic account of human nature in the world. It could be a great way to let out one's inner feelings.”

“This is because he'd accepted, as did everyone else in France, that there was a hierarchy in writing styles, and near the top was the form known as the alexandrine, where each line has twelve syllables and a pause is mandatory after the sixth syllable. Sometimes the repetitive singsong that results works well, as anyone who's taken trains in France will remember. The standard boarding announcement—“Messieurs, dames les voyageurs, en voiture s'il vous plaît ”—is close to an alexandrine. But used for hours on end it gets hard to take.

One sentence must rise and, from that peak it must fall This may happen quickly, or it may then be slow But it must keep on thus, however dull the rush”

“When a couple first meets, their relation can just be of two bodies, entranced in a timeless space, and there the younger one naturally has the advantage. As time goes on, though, wider life enters in.”

Yet another brilliant women nearly lost to history due to her behavior and associations with a man of power. Bodanis does a wonderful job of bringing Emilie du Chatelet to life in Passionate Minds. Unlike previous biographies which focus on Voltaire and add Emilie as a sidenote, this book brings her incredible story into the spotlight. And with all the adventures she had with her husband, Voltaire, and several other male acquaintances, the work certainly makes for lively reading. Of course, Emilie wasn't all swashbuckling (though she did have a romance with the son of a famous privateer) but also possessed an incredible mind in an age when most women were barely literate. She also married well in that she found a husband who would leave her to her studies and romances, provided she didn't embarrass their aristocratic name. (On a side note, Bodanis' analysis of the various levels of French aristocracy shortly before the Revolution is quite enlightening in itself.) With such freedom, she was able to submit papers for national competitions (almost won) and devote her life to re-writing Newton's Principia using his new calculus instead of the mind-boggling mathematics used to obscure the concepts in the original.

Overall, a very approachable biography for anyone interested in another "missing" woman of science. The last section, "What Followed", covers the principal personas after Emilie's death, which is also kinda nice. "Further Reading" sorts the long bibliography by topic and the endnotes are incredibly interesting and thorough. Unfortunately, like many other modern biographies, there are no in-text citations or numbering for the endnotes, so I found myself reading each chapter followed by the notes (which also aren't segregated by chapter but listed by page number) because many were so extensive.