For years, I've been looking for a good biography of Emilie du Chatelet -- and Voltaire has always been a favorite of mine. This one is superb. Focusing on the relationship between the two, Bodanis gives us a satisfying picture of their brilliant lives without overburdening the book with a padding of irrelevant minutiae.
Voltaire's foibles keep the book lively, and while Emilie appears to have been the stabilizing force between them, the immoderate passion leading to her untimely death is presented in its full force.
Voltaire's brilliance has survived the centuries but full credit is given here to Emilie's genius. She supplied major stepping stones to scientific thought in the eighteenth century, and her contribution is highlighted, but with sufficient restraint of detail that even my attention did not waver.
It was a delightful read to the very end, and I recommend it highly

I think this book deserves a 3.5 but, once again, our rating system is not that precise. I really enjoyed learning about how Emilie and Voltaire's relationship altered the course of each other's lives and ultimately the course of history. My one gripe has more to do with the billing of the book than its actual substance: the dust jacket talks about this being a great love story when I think it's really about a long relationship. The two may have been in love for a time, but really most of the impact of the relationship is when they were being a mixture of competitive and supportive, not all the time they spent in bed or writing odes. Oh, and they may have been geniuses, but if Bodanis called one of them intelligent ONE MORE TIME I was going to hurl.

TMI! DISSAPOINTING.

“ ‘If I were king,’ she mulled in a later writing, ‘ women would be able to take part in all human rights, especially ones involving our reason.’ “—location 672/5457

What a terrific title: Passionate Minds. Hard to resist. What a disappointment that passions of the flesh seemed to hold such a gossipy, fascination for the author, David Bodanis.

A glimpse at the workings and the output of two brilliant minds of The Enlightment… priceless.

A feel for the ambiance, the attitudes, the people, and the culture of 18th century France—even the droll excesses, corruption, and self-indulgence… perhaps worth the effort.

The dalliances—sleazy, illicit, and salacious, or not—of somebody-or-other’s, third cousin’s casual friend, now centuries dead… boring.

Recommendation: Too many words for too little reward.

“He then visualized men as they really are, insects devouring one another on a little atom of mud.”—location 3250/5457

Kindle edition, 5457 locations

Interesting to read and gives nice glimpse of life of the well off at that time, but Voltaire and de Châtelet don’t come really to life...most likely because the author is sticking quite closely to the facts. Still nice to learn of such a bright, curious woman who challenges herself and makes a mark

This is a frothy historical biography best described by its title. Unfortunately it does not live up to either the dramatic promise of its subtitle, or to the serious intentions stated in its preface. In that preface, the author bemoans the lack of recognition of early 18th century aristocratic French scientist Emilie du Chatelet, stating that she was written out of the canon by men who didn’t believe a woman could make serious contributions, and that the society hostesses and later feminist writers who might have championed her lacked the technical knowledge to understand her work, with the result that female biographers just focused on her wild sex life. Bodanis then proceeds to tell a story of du Chatelet’s life focused on her wild sex life, with only brief segments about science that provided little enlightenment to this reader.

In particular, Bodanis is enamored of du Chatelet’s tumultuous 15-year affair with Voltaire, and structures the book around that. It’s almost a dual biography (to the point that my library shelves it as a biography of Voltaire), except that Voltaire outlived du Chatelet by decades and those years aren’t covered in this book. Bodanis seems attached to the notion that this relationship provided du Chatelet with the confidence and support she needed to engage in scientific work, but it seemed to me that much of the evidence he provides argues against this conclusion. For instance, in one episode, Voltaire decides to enter a scientific competition, and du Chatelet spends her days assisting him with his experiments, but for some reason feels she can’t tell him where he’s going wrong, and meanwhile secretly stays up late every night working on her own submission, which she hides from him and ultimately mails off with the assistance of her extremely laid-back husband, who appears genuinely indifferent throughout to the fact that she’s living openly with another man. Which of these people is actually providing useful support, and which one has become an obstacle? I came away from the book with the impression that du Chatelet’s penchant for falling wildly in love with various men was a tragic distraction from her work, perhaps in part due to the author’s focus.

It’s a focus, in the end, that involves compressing complicated events into such short segments that I found them a bit difficult to keep track of, while lovingly expanding on descriptions of emotions and relationship dilemmas. These people wrote constantly, so I don’t think Bodanis is speculating, but it does come across as frothy. Interestingly, in the acknowledgements he says that while writing the book, he sent it out in installments to friends, and they and their friends and coworkers all eagerly signed up for more. But then, he says, that draft, nearly twice the length of the book he ultimately published, “wasn’t quite right. . . . There was to much to-ing and fro-ing, too much textual analysis and historical background, and too much elaboration of science and the biographer’s evidence.” I for one suspect I would have thought more of this book if it had included all that stuff, and the contrast between the word-of-mouth excitement Bodanis describes around his draft and the small number of readers who have rated the completed version on Goodreads makes me suspect it’s not just me, and what he cut was more essential than he realized.

Ultimately, this was an interesting book that I don’t regret reading, and it had a great start, but after 60 pages or so I began to fall out of love with it and never regained that level of enjoyment. Great material, but perhaps not the best possible treatment of it.

The largely unknown story of Emilie du Chatelet ((1706-1749), her work and her lifelong love affair and friendship with Voltaire. A brilliant mathematician and physicist in an age when women were mostly illiterate, she had an indefatigable passion for science and was responsible for furthering and popularizing the work Newton She was an original thinker about the nature of light and energy, far ahead of her time. The book is full of the colour of 18th C France, passionate love affairs, midnight escapes from the secret police and amongst it all the strange and enduring relationship between Emilie and Voltaire.

Interesting and reflects the chaos of their two lives. But the intellectual side feels under represented or the biographical less woven

Passionate Minds is the story of two brilliant indivdiuals, Emilie du Chatelet and Voltaire: their off-and-on partnership (both romantic and intellectual), and their role in the world's transition to modernity. Both protagonists have longer-form names: "Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet" and "François-Marie Arouet", reflecting their relative stations within the ruling French aristocracy. It is a place and time period for which I have little inherent interest, and it is to David Bodanis's credit that I was so engaged in the tale.

Voltaire (François-Marie's pen name) is already well known as a poet, satirist, playwright and author. It was fascinating to learn about his constant evasion of prosecution by the upper crust he'd insulted with verse, his keen ability to make the best of a bad situation (once by manipulating a lottery into vast wealth and other times by writing new works), his constant hypochondria, and his largely unsuccessful forays into science.

Emilie du Chatelet is the real breakout star here - at least, this was the first time I had encountered her. Emilie's life is especially interesting when contrasted with that of her contemporaries. She was not formally trained in the sciences, but one of her father's friends shared astronomy with her. Emilie collected books on her own, even using her natural skill at calculation to game the gambling tables, earning proceeds to purchase more books. She could hold her own in a sword fight against even a trained military man. She was an adept mathematician and theoretician, and extrapolated from her readings to calculate the force of gravity on Jupiter and the speed light traveled across the solar system.

I was fascinated to learn of the sexual freedom Emilie enjoyed. Though married to a military officer, it was understood that he would have mistresses and she would carry on her own affairs. When her romance with Voltaire began, they were thrilled to have found intellectual equals. While she excelled in mathematics and scientific inquiry, Voltaire was a master of writing. Together they created a volume explaining the works of Newton - Voltaire got credit as the author, but he dedicated the work to her, and an illustrated frontispiece depicted Emily as the true reflector of Newton's genius, and Voltaire as the humble scribe. In a later contest, both carried on independent inquiries into the nature of fire; Voltaire attempted to measure weight loss-and-gain as metals were heated (there is weight fluctuation, but his scales were orders of magnitude too coarse to measure it) and Emilie in secret devised an experiment that would test the energies of the component wavelengths of light. It is a shame that she had the resources at hand to carry out these experiments, but hesitated in order to not usurp Voltaire. Decades later the experiment would produce important results. Emilie and Voltaire took turns collaborating and competing, but each spurred the other to greater achievement. Even Candide, though produced after Emilie's death, can be read as Voltaire's last word on their debates over the merits of Liebniz's "optimism" - a new concept of "the best possible world" that Emilie championed and Voltaire despised.

As both Voltaire and Emilie operated in the highest circles, we learn much of the nobility and aristocracy that surrounded them - the various places they were invited to stay, the people who stayed with them, and the affairs they and others engaged in. There is an interesting undercurrent of stories about the poor sanitation of the time, methods of communication, military meaneuvers, competing plays, and other concerns of the day. Sadly, Emilie died in her early forties giving birth to a child (fathered by one of her other love interests, Saint-Lambert) who only surived for about a year. Thankfully, Emilie was able to complete her magnum opus, a detailed examination of some difficult Newtonian mathematics, before her death. It is fascinating to ponder how much more minds like Emilie's and Voltaire's could have accomplished if not hampered by custom and constantly fleeing capture, paying off debts, fighting illness, and the coping with the various vagaries of 18th century Europe.

Very interesting, good to read about an intelligent woman who deserves more recognition.

I quite enjoyed this one. It's an area I know little about, and while the style is rather tabloid it's informative especially on the society and politics. Rather vague on the science, but that's fine. So am I.

This is a deeply researched and compelling story about Voltaire and his long-time lover and intellectual partner, Emilie du Chatelet.

A wonderful read with fascinating characters, the book’s primary storyline focuses on the pair’s complicated relationship. It also shines a light on how women were treated in the years leading up to the Age of Enlightenment, and Emilie is portrayed as a feminist well before the term was even invented.

This book reads like a novel, even though it is based on history.

This is quite possibly one of the BEST books I have ever read. Strangely enough it was recommended to me in a bar, by a girl who had a degree in French History, specifically the French Revolution. We were talking about Voltaire and how I disliked Candide and she told me it was an allegory and said I should read this book.

Although I have a degree in Quantum Mechanics I had never heard of Emilie DuChatelet. How surprising it was to find out that she was one of the first people to translate Newton's geometry into more readily understandable calculus. She set up equations that scientists such as Einstein and Planck used to start the study of Quantum Mechanics 200 years later.

The story is romantic and beautiful and so full of information settled so nicely inside the author's own language that you don't even know you're learning something. It reads like fiction, but is based solely on fact and authentic letters sent between Emilie and Voltaire and a myriad of other characters.

This is a must-read book for anybody! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE!