You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Dr Jacob Bronowksi's The Ascent of Man traces the development of human society through our understanding of science. First published in 1973 to accompany the groundbreaking BBC television series, it is considered one of the first works of 'popular science', illuminating the historical and social context of scientific development for a generation of readers. In his highly accessible style, Dr Bronowski discusses human invention from the flint tool to geometry, agriculture to genetics, and from alchemy to the theory of relativity, showing how they all are expressions of our ability to understand and control nature. In this new paperback edition, The Ascent of Man inspires, influences and informs as profoundly as ever.
None
Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) lived through what he described as 'the two great catastrophes of the twentieth century: the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945', and yet the keynote of his astonishingly rich and varied life and work was an enduring optimism. Bronowski was a professional scientist, scientific administrator, poet, philosopher, dramatist and television and radio personality, possessing an energy and versatility that make him a rare figure in our cultural history. His final achievement, the groundbreaking television series The Ascent of Man, first shown in 1973, influenced and inspired millions of ordinary people by bringing an awareness of human evo...
Jacob Bronowski was, with Kenneth Clarke, the greatest popularizer of serious ideas in Britain between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s. Trained as a mathematician, he was equally at home with painting and physics, and wrote a series of brilliant books that tried to break down the barriers between 'the two cultures'. He denounced 'the destructive modern prejudice that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests'. He wrote a fine book on William Blake while running the National Coal Board's research establishment. The Common Sense of Science, first published in 1951, is a vivid attempt to explain in ordinary language how science is done and how scientists think. He isola...
Science and Human Values was originally a lecture by Jacob Bronowski at MIT in 1953. Published five years later, it opens unforgettably with Bronowski's description of Nagasaki in 1945: 'a bare waste of ashes', making him acutely aware of science's power both for good and for evil. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? With care and erudition Bronowski argues that scientific endeavour is an essentially creative act, part of a great shared human interest in ourselves and the world around us; and, routinely, a process of trial-and-error, the end of which is not - cannot be - preordained. 'Above all, Bronowski strove to make science and technology answerable to social progress, to 'human values.' He anticipated the deepening gap between the 'two cultures' and knew that the sciences must be restored to a place in political common sense.' George Steiner
Bronowski was fascinated by William Blake for much of his life. His first book about him, A Man Without a Mask , was published in 1944. In 1958 his famous Penguin selection of Blake's poems and letters was published. As further testimony to Bronowski's enthusiasm it should be noted that the final plate in the book of his great TV series The Ascent of Man is Blake's frontispiece to Songs of Experience . William Blake and the Age of Revolution , first published in 1965, is, in some ways, a revised edition of A Man Without a Mask, in others, a new book. In it Bronowski gives a stimulating interpretation of Blake's art and poetry in the context of the revolutionary period in which he was working. Like all of Bronowski's writings it dazzles with wide-ranging erudition, making this work far removed from conventional literary criticism.
Traces the development of thought through historical movements and periods from 1500 to 1830.
The well-known scientist discusses the place of science in the total field of human knowledge throughout the history of Western civilization and the importance of scientific values in the twentieth century
"Jacob Bronowski truly educated an enormous number of members of that diffuse population usually referred to, with a hint of condescension, as "educated laymen" through his widely shared television series on the concepts of science and through such ... books as The Identity of Man and The Ascent of Man. This volume extends the process to a further level of insight, and it may be more than suggestive that its final essay is entitled "The Fulfillment of Man." Bronowski ... felt that if human beings are taken seriously, they can be led to respond to serious and difficult subjects that relate to the deepest aspects of nature, both beyond and within themselves. A Sense of the Future ... is a coll...
Essays defending the human claim to have a mind.