Rating: 
Summary: pushing it too far
Review: This is an odd book. I think that it's main problem is that it is a popular science writer who is trying to say something original as well. While I by no means wish to disparage gifted amateurs from pursuing their own investigations, that kind of formula tends to work better when the writer first and foremost a specialist, on the caliber of SJ Gould, which White clearly is not.White's contention, in concentrating on Leonardo's investigations, is that he was in fact acting as a scientist, perhaps the first modern one: using direct experiment to test theories that he was formulating. While Leonardo was certainly doing this, it all depends on how you define science. If it is experimentation to validate and change your mathematical theories, OK. But if you mean participating in a community that shares a larger theoretical foundation and then communicating your results for a kind of peer review, which Kepler and Galileo did, Leonardo most definitely was not a modern scientist: he kept his notebooks to himself and feared plagarism almost paranoically. Unfortuantely, White leaves the definition unclear and so turns his book into a strange kind of anacronistic exercise. If you focus on the work on others, you can argue that many were "the first modern scientists." Some hundreds of years before Leonardo, the builders of gothic cathedrals appear to have had geometric concepts (math), which they carved into massive stone by trail and error (experiment), and they also had an overarching highly logical intellectual system, scholasticism, that was adaptive and very rich. Why not argue that they were the first real scientists? Moreover, it is not even clear that White wants to systematically argue that Leonardo was "first," but merely that he was a pioneer. Does it even make sense to argue such a thing? What does it really add? We all know he was a genius who was largely self-educated and hence did not share the aristotelian assumptions inherent in scholasticism. But Leonardo was not systematic: with the exception of his great anatomical studies, he jotted thing down most things privately and in code, so you really have to interpret a lot of things heavily to find meaning in them. Nonetheless, this was the first bio I read of Leonardo and it was quite interesting. Indeed, it gave me an appetite to seek more on him, though I would go for his art and engineering in the next go. It covers many of the standard details adequately and is written clearly, even beautifully. When the author speculates, which I think he does far too often, he at least makes it clear that that is what he is doing. Recommended as a starting point.
Rating: 
Summary: Tabloids from the 16th century!
Review: While Micheal White's book does serve as an interesting introduction to some of the biographical history of the iconoclastic Leonardo, White includes so much subjective narrative following up the context of each chapter that he turns the "total man" goal of his study into a hyperbolic and titillating read that could very well have been lifted from the "Milanese Inquirer", if such a tabloidic rag existed so long ago! Hey, it probably did! But do we have to pay [money] for a ... Italian rag? All right, I'm no writer, but I would hate to have read this book as cliff note version for class and then had my semester grade riding on the final exam. If this is what you're thinking, don't do it! Leonardo would thank you if he could...
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