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anneofgreenplaces 's review for:
Leonardo Da Vinci
by Walter Isaacson
This was a long but easy listen, an accessible cataloguing of Leonardo's delightfully mind-bending array of passions, foibles, wrestles, and epiphanies. It's such a boon that Leonardo scribbled obsessively in notebooks and that so many of them survived, because there is *so* much more to him than the few finished works he left behind (genius though they are). As Isaacson points out more than once, Leonardo's penchant for plunging into a project only to dwindle into an endless touching and retouching up, or to pursue a question relentlessly until he was satisfied with his answers but feeling no need to go as far as publishing them, are very humanizing and relatable qualities. Especially for those of us with ADHD. (There seems to be a lot of evidence pointing to this potential diagnosis for Leonardo.) But the number of times Isaacson had reason to say "In this conclusion Leonardo was two centuries ahead of his time..." I wish I had kept a tally. I was especially delighted by his insatiable and wide-ranging interest in the natural and physical world, from comparative human vs. horse anatomy to fluid dynamics to stratigraphy to flight mechanics to "how does the woodpecker's tongue work?" And it was for some reason also delightful that his deep intuition for geometry was matched by his ineptitude with arithmetic and algebra. I also had forgotten or was unaware before reading this that Leonardo was gay, and not too bothered by being so in an oppressive climate.
Anyway, there's a lot more that could be enumerated from the treasure trove of Leonardo da Vinci's fascinations. I recommend the book if you want more. I will say the writing style bordered on bland at times and was certainly repetitive in a "Don't forget about this key takeaway" or "Maybe you're reading this slowly enough that you've forgotten this piece of contextual information I phrased in almost exactly the same way ten chapters ago" kind of way, but it's thorough and informative all the same. (You don't need to bother with the introduction or epilogue, though, it's the worst of the repetition without any new information.)
Anyway, there's a lot more that could be enumerated from the treasure trove of Leonardo da Vinci's fascinations. I recommend the book if you want more. I will say the writing style bordered on bland at times and was certainly repetitive in a "Don't forget about this key takeaway" or "Maybe you're reading this slowly enough that you've forgotten this piece of contextual information I phrased in almost exactly the same way ten chapters ago" kind of way, but it's thorough and informative all the same. (You don't need to bother with the introduction or epilogue, though, it's the worst of the repetition without any new information.)