Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts

This hefty, beautiful, and mysterious book tempted me from across the store for months, and when I finally had the time to sit down with it, it turned out to be all of those things: hefty, beautiful, and still mysterious. The first book in Maria Popova's new Marginalian imprint for the excellent McNally Jackson Books, it's a biography (of sorts) of the 19th-century scientist Willard Gibbs, first published in 1942 by the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Gibbs was a titan—Rukeyser, not outlandishly, counts him as one of the four great Americans of his time, along with Lincoln, Whitman, and Melville—but largely unknown then and still so now, even as his ideas, in their brilliant connection and abstraction across mathematics, physics, and chemistry, laid the foundation for much of what the 20th century discovered. "A modest man," in Rukeyser's words, "living and dying in the space of three New Haven blocks," his life story is almost vacant, so she makes it a biography of an entire age, of industrial and social transformation and of brainy, searching peers like William James and Henry Adams. It is a dense, lyrical, fascinating book, full of science that largely flew over my head and cultural history as wise as any I've read. That Rukeyser wrote it all by the time she was 29 is astounding, and makes me even more curious about her than about her elusive subject.