Peter Ackroyd
Newton.
Nan A. Talese, 192 pages, $21.95
Peter Ackroyd is an acclaimed and prolific British novelist, poet, dramatist, and biographer. He has written biographies about Shakespeare, Dickens, Blake, Thomas More, Oscar Wilde, Poe, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. His history of London was a recent bestseller. His new biography of Isaac Newton follows lives of Chaucer and J. M. W. Turner.
There has been a raft of recent biographies of Newton, notably Richard Westfall’s Never at Rest. Why another one? The answer is that a brief life of Newton meets a widespread need. Longer biographies may tell you more about a person than you care to know. Although there are no new or startling revelations in Ackroyd’s book, its facts are accurate, his judgments sound, and his writing a great pleasure to read.
Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was a strange, improbable blend of a great mathematician and physicist, one of history’s greatest, with the mindset of an ignorant, naïve fundamentalist. A practicing Anglican, he never doubted that God created the entire universe in six literal days, that He once drowned every human and beast except for Noah and his companions, that Eve was fabricated from Adam’s rib, that Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt, that Moses parted the Red Sea, and that the prophecies of Daniel and the Book of Revelation came straight from the Almighty and are certain to be fulfilled.
Newton tried to calculate the exact date of
