The Ascent of Man
Anthony de Gesu (Author photograph) Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1973. Presumed First Paperback Edition, First printing {"A" on verso]. Trade paperback. 448 pages. Illustrations (some in color). Bibliography. Index. Some cover wear and soiling. Jacob Bronowski (18 January 1908 – 22 August 1974) was a Polish-British mathematician and philosopher. He was known to friends and professional colleagues alike by the nickname Bruno. He is best known for developing a humanistic approach to science, and as the presenter and writer of the thirteen-part 1973 BBC television documentary series, and accompanying book, The Ascent of Man, which led to his regard as "one of the world's most celebrated intellectuals". Bronowski's family moved from Congress Poland to Germany and then to England while he was a child. He won a scholarship to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge. His interests have been described as ranging "widely, from biology to poetry and from chess to Humanism". He taught mathematics at the University College Hull between 1934 and 1942. During World War II he led the field of operations research and worked to increase the effectiveness of Allied bombing. After the war he headed the projects division of UNESCO. Bronowski wrote poetry and had a deep affinity with William Blake. From 1950 to 1963 he worked for the National Coal Board in the UK. From 1963 he was a resident fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, until his death in 1974 in East Hampton, New York, just a year after the airing of his Ascent of Man. An account of the history and philosophy of science drawn from the BBC television series created by Dr. Bronowski. Dr. Jacob Bronowksi's classic traces the development of human society through our understanding of science. First published in 1973 to accompany the groundbreaking BBC television series, it is considered one of the first works of "popular science," illuminating the historical and social context of scientific development for a generation of readers. In his highly accessible style, Dr. Bronowski discusses human invention from the flint tool to geometry, agriculture to genetics, and from alchemy to the theory of relativity, showing how they all are expressions of our ability to understand and control nature. The Ascent of Man inspires, influences, and informs us profoundly. Derived from a Kirkus review: Another of those beautifully produced BBC lecture courses that have been bringing Western culture -- a dazzling and welcome shock -- to TV audiences, translated into a handsome and substantial text. The topic is big: taking off from Darwin's title The Descent of Man, Bronowski goes ahead to chronicle the development of the sciences and allied, imaginative and uniquely human activities by which man managed to obscure and transcend his ancestry. The accomplishment tends to be undervalued in the present atmosphere of ecological guilt, and particularly in books pitched at this educated lay level; but Bronowski goes a long way toward redeeming the traditional Crown-of-Creation attitude, with a stunning and varied range of information, and in a style so suavely entertaining and well ordered that one doesn't immediately appreciate how many recent, even in some cases radical, assumptions about the nature of man and science it incorporates. For example, the broadened consideration of cultural and psychological factors, such as the analytic implications of architecture, and the importance of techniques as analogues; and a conception of historical process that readmits such shady figures as Paracelsus and mundane pursuits as farming. Beginning with the bare hands and ready, three-pound brain of the earliest hominids, he traces the gradual, self-accelerating profusion of means -- tools, techniques, theories -- which have extended our intellectual grasp now to the point of encompassing intellect itself. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Humanity, Fossil, Hunter, Nomad, Agriculture, Machu Piccchu, Architecture, Alloys, John Dalton, Numbers, Pythagoras, Mathematics, Ptolemy, Telescope, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Relativity, Technology, Charles Darwin, Evolution, Uncertain
ISBN: 0316109304
[Book #87674]
Price: $32.50