Word: wonderments
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...there a duet playing in the back of his mind, I wonder, when Sir Edward Downes, the former conductor of Britain's Royal Opera, held hands with his wife of 54 years and drank the poison with her? Wagner maybe, or Verdi's Aida, one lover condemned to die, the other choosing to follow rather than live half a life, all alone...
This anecdote appears in The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (Pantheon; 576 pages), which is the most flat-out fascinating book so far this year. You wouldn't get that from its title, which sounds like a tender coming-of-age novel, nor from its subtitle - How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - which sounds like a course you napped through in college. But Holmes' account of experimental science at the end of the 1700s - when amateurs could still make major discoveries, when one new data point could overthrow a worldview - is beyond riveting. Science...
Herschel is the most touching figure in Age of Wonder. A refugee from Germany, he began his career as an oboist, but at 27 became consumed with curiosity about the stars and started building his own telescopes. He was discovered by the son of a Royal Society member, who stumbled over him moon-gazing in the streets one night through a home-brewed 7-ft. (2 m) telescope that turned out to be more powerful than that of the astronomer royal. Herschel went on to pioneer the idea of a vast and unimaginably old universe. After looking through Herschel...
...Walked With a Zombie and Night of the Living Dead, those slow-moving, post-mortem drudges of West African mythic origin are now the hot horror creature. The PR is positively zombastic. They have their own anthem - Zombies Are the New Black, by the Philly pop-punk sextet The Wonder Years - and their own music video, which you may have seen in the past month or so: Michael Jackson's Thriller. The Walking Dead have even been invoked as emblems of our current financial malaise. Their chief apologist and spin doctor, TIME's Lev Grossman, trumpets the zombie...
With sensitivities like those, it's little wonder the poll found French women had strong opinions about public nakedness. Nearly 50% said they were bothered by total nudity on beaches or naturist camps, and 37% said they were disturbed by publicly exposed breasts or buttocks. Forty-five percent of respondents reported they'd prefer to see a lot less flesh hanging out in full view - male or female...