You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.19 AVERAGE
4.19 AVERAGE
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
This biography is mind boggling thorough. My favorite parts are where Isaacson analyzes the paintings. I hadn't realized, though, how much da Vinci disliked painting and how few he actually finished. Some additional details I wish had been included are the provenance of the paintings. Some other things that fascinated me was his obsession with the circle and the square. I do see that genius can be a blessing and a curse.
Even as a kid I've always looked up to Leonardo and the way he approaches everything with the curiosity of a child. He does not discriminate between fields, and is very knowledgeable in both arts and sciences. Through his story and his notebooks, I renewed my sense of wonder and appreciation not just for the arts but also for the sciences (especially anatomy) after years of studying them. I definitely see myself rereading this book again at some point.
--
It's not a spoiler that he dies but I still got sad when I got to it :( "The soup is getting cold" now joins "My battery is low and it's getting dark" as last words that will make me teary ㅠㅠ
--
It's not a spoiler that he dies but I still got sad when I got to it :( "The soup is getting cold" now joins "My battery is low and it's getting dark" as last words that will make me teary ㅠㅠ
[2017] Got this as a gift a couple of years ago and I’ve been wanting to get to it ever since, and now I’m so glad I did. Not one to read all at once, but a little bit each day over the last month or so was perfect for me. I was pretty sure Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa but that was about all I knew going in. Now I know he was a creative and intellectual genius. It was so well written, I stayed interested the entire way through. Isaacson does a great job balancing Leo's personal life story with the incredible scope of his work, from his paintings to his military engineering to his breakthroughs in anatomy and study of nature and so much more. This could easily have been a boring text book, bogged down with minutiae, but Isaacson kept it clear, straightforward, and with just the right level of detail - infinitely readable. May pick up his book on Edison next.
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
slow-paced
“Leonardo became one of the major western thinkers, more than a century before Galileo, to pursue in a persistent hands-on fashion the dialogue between experiment and theory that would lead to the modern Scientific Revolution.”
informative
inspiring
medium-paced