"Figuring" by Maria Popova (published 2019)

I chose Maria Popova's "Figuring" as a Staff Pick for CPL in May. I was only halfway through, but here is my annotation from my recommendation:

Beginning with planetary motion and ending with ecology, Figuring is an impressive historical treatise on the scientific mind. Connections are made between moments in science, philosophy, art and social circumstance, all the while bringing great women of science and culture to the forefront of a new understanding of history. The erudite prose within these pages makes heady and otherwise academic language graspable for an audience inclined to the intellectual. Its aim is to share and teach more than entertain, but fascinating anecdotes about figures both well-known (such as William Faulkner) and lesser-known (such as Maria Mitchell) are bound to enthrall and touch. Give yourself time with this book: it's best taken in slowly and savored. Author Maria Popova is the mind behind the popular literary website Brain Pickings. 

I completed the book in full today: here is my review:

We know that women have influenced and created sums of what we understand as mankind. We know this in our hearts and minds. But do we recognize it? Do we give heed and homage to the importance of their paths, their footprints?

Maria Mitchell, Emily Dickinson, Rachel Carson. Virginia Woolf. Margaret Fuller, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Peabody. Harriet Hosmer. Louisa May Alcott.

Those are just over a handful of the women whose minds and biographies Maria Popova traverses with her pen, writing a very different kind of history, without any neglect to men. But in "Figuring", it is these women whose femininity, addressed and articulated in countless unfathomable ways, who are brought to the fore. Their figures are mapped by Popova in a text-book *like* style that is anything but simply chronological. Popova is brilliant in contextualizing moments in the personal lives of each subject (who also include men such as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne) by one major factor: love. 

Love in the lives of those who accolades seem removed from it cannot be ignored. Love in the lives of those figures in science, history, art cannot be removed from an understanding of the accomplishment itself. These figures demanded nourishment from love, which Popova proves through her book as nothing but a noble request. If "Figuring" provided me anything, it provided me with this knowledge: that the relations with have with one another are not exempt from the intellectual profits reaped from any one individual person. 

If we are to progress and understand our nation's totality in order to move forward as happy and healthy; as fruitful, as possible, striving for a community that is one of freedom as we say and democracy on a larger scale, Popova's "Figuring" shines a great luminescence on what has been forged already so we can continue to carve our way out of these seemingly unrelenting boundaries that block our way.