to elphenor and Mucha na Dziko for books that look really interesting to me.
Sorry that I can't award you an online thumbs up, adidass. Despite several attempts, I don't think I've ever finished a Salman Rushdie book, and I remember giving up on
The Satanic Verses even earlier than I usually give up on his books. The Magic Realism style is just not for me.
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On the topic of what's real and what's magic, I'm reading this for the second time:-
In style it's a straightforward conventional biog, but is "ground-breaking" (according to the cover) in that it emphasises Newton's explorations into alchemy: something he devoted a lot of time to throughout his life, even while working out the rules of science that we'd live by for the next 400 years or so.
I'm still in an early chapter of the book, in which Michael White is looking at the precedents of early science, and what strikes me most is what a quagmire of muddled thinking good old Newton rescued us from. As an example of just how lost people were in their ideas, here's something about Paracelsus, who lived about 150 years before Newton:-
Despite the Latin name he chose for himself, Paracelsus was born in Switzerland and is describe most positively in wikipedia:-
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He was a pioneer in several aspects of the "medical revolution" of the Renaissance, emphasizing the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the "father of toxicology"
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Surprising to me, therefore, is this quote from the writings of Paracelsus:-
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Our special task is to generate the inner power of metals and direct these to disease. The physician must judge the nature of medicine according to the stars. Since medicine is worthless save in so far as it is from heaven, it is necessary that it shall be derived from heaven.
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Thank you, Newton for rescuing us all from so many misguided ideas. (Mind you, when I say "all", I'm not including Margerie Taylor Green with her space lasers and peach tree dishes, Trump with his bleach and who knows how many anti-science charlatans operating around the globe.)