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Summary
Summary
A distinguished chronicler of the human body and spirit interprets a Renaissance genius. Scholarly and passionate, Nuland's work takes readers deep into the first truly modern, empirical mind, one that was centuries ahead of its time.
Author Notes
Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland was born Shepsel Ber Nudelman on December 8, 1930 in the Bronx, New York. He received a bachelor's degree from New York University in 1951 and a medical degree from Yale University in 1955. He decided to specialize in surgery and in 1958, became the chief surgical resident at Yale-New Haven Hospital. From 1962 to 1991, he was a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also taught bioethics and medical history. Before retiring to write full-time, he was a surgeon at Yale-New Haven Hospital from 1962 to 1992.
His books include Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, The Wisdom of the Body, The Doctors' Plague, The Uncertain Art, and the memoir Lost in America. His book, How We Die, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1994. He was also a contributing editor to The American Scholar and The New Republic. He died of prostate cancer on March 3, 2014 at the age of 83.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Say what one will about Edna O'Brien's ravishing clip job of Joyce, Peter Gay's moderate Mozart or Edmund White's microcosmic Proust, the editors at Penguin Lives have a knack for matching up free-thinking meditators and their subjects. A surgeon and a writer about medicine, Nuland (How We Die) uses much of his brief bookÄlimited in size and scope to the series's quick-take, authorially inflected formatÄto explain the prodigal da Vinci as pioneering anatomist. The first 11 pages detail Nuland's personal obsession with da Vinci; the later pages describe da Vinci's concern with human and animal anatomy, and review the bibliographical jumble of his surviving notebooks and papers. Nuland's da Vinci is tireless, perhaps sublimated, in his intellectual and artistic activity, finishing few canvases (one the Mona Lisa, another The Last Supper) and almost nothing else during a long life largely financed, sometimes erratically, by patrons who indirectly supported an expensive retinue of friends, assistants and servants. He emerges as a compulsive investigatorÄof geometry, optics, hydraulics, architecture, sculpture, painting, botany, biology, military mechanics and the flight of birdsÄmoving from city-state to city-state in Italy, encountering ruler after ruler who sought to harness his gifts. Yet perhaps unforgivably, given the series's promise of New Yorker profile-like effervescence, da Vinci as personality slips away; what we get is a clean condensation of the facts. Only the final chapter, "Matters of the Heart and Other Matters," injects some of Leonardo's own fervor, in an in-depth look at one of his abiding obsessions, the structure and function of the human heart. Nuland's account is solid, but lacks enough of the flourish that its subject so effortlessly achieved and, that, on a much smaller scale, the Lives series seems to strive for. 4 illus. BOMC, QPB, History Book Club selections. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Leonardo has profited from the notion that he was a peerless genius and suffered from a reputation for never completing his undertakings. The bad rap against him is borne out by the lack of his finished masterpieces in all the kinds of places where the works of, say, his younger contemporary Michelangelo bulk large. But Leonardo's unfinished masterworks--paintings such as the Mona Lisa, which he considered incomplete and never surrendered to its commissioner, and his scientific notebooks, of which only a third are known to survive--confirm his towering intelligence. Nuland, surgeon-author of How We Die (1993) and The Mysteries Within [BKL D 15 99], elegantly sketches Leonardo's life of constant employment by noblemen eager to enjoy the prestige he reflected on them and of even more constant curiosity, which drove him to become the greatest anatomist before Vasari. Indeed, he was better than Vasari, for he pioneered methods of anatomical rendering and made discoveries that weren't repeated until as late as the twentieth century. A scintillating addition to the Penguin Lives series. --Ray Olson
Library Journal Review
Nuland is the author of the best-selling How We Die and clinical professor of surgery at Yale, where he teaches medical history and ethics. In this "Penguin Life" biography, his characteristically nonacademic, essay-like style is interspersed with clearly labeled opinions about disputed topics regarding the artist's life, such as his sexual orientation and activity. Nuland devotes the first 120 pages of his brief book to Leonardo's pursuit of life as what we would call a scientist. The remaining 50 pages are focused specifically on his works as an anatomist. Nuland chronicles Leonardo's insights and mistakes and discusses his place in the history of anatomical studies. Leonardo was the first to make many discoveries in science and anatomy, but few of his contemporaries ever knew of his achievements. Michael White's Leonardo: The First Scientist (LJ 8/00) also discusses Leonardo's scientific life but is longer and much more comprehensive. Nuland's book is written for a general audience and is a bit more accessible. If you can afford only one book, get the White. Otherwise, Nuland's is a good choice for public and college libraries. (Index not seen.) [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/00; BOMC selection.]DEric D. Albright, Duke Univ. Medical Ctr. Lib., Durham, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.