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the complete review - biography

The Curious Life of Robert Hooke

by
Lisa Jardine

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : good overview of an interesting figure

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  More about Hooke than the book, but generally very impressed

  From the Reviews:

• "Professor Jardine has had the benefit of reading Inwood's book; she has also been able to do more research on Hooke's early years on the Isle of Wight; she has made some important archival discoveries (in particular, the records of a court case challenging the disposal of Hooke's property after his death); and she has identified what may well be a hitherto unknown portrait of Hooke. For all these reasons -- plus the descriptive brio of her prose -- it might be thought that Inwood's book was now superseded. But although Jardine has important information to add, Inwood's remains the fuller account" - Noel Malcolm, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "In this thoughtful, crisp and finely illustrated biography, Lisa Jardine sets out to adjust the balance. Hooke has not been neglected -- his writings and diary have been edited, modern studies abound, and a new biography by Stephen Inwood appeared last year. But he remains a puzzle. (...) Perhaps because Jardine has written about him before (...) there are some gaps -- I should have liked to know more about his work with microscopes, and his ideas about astronomy -- but to compensate she offers a vivid map of the byways of patronage and politics that governed British intellectual life." - Jenny Uglow, The Guardian
  
  
• "Much of Jardine's book is like accompanying this frenzied man to the office. Hooke was always overworked and in litigation over some dispute about intellectual property or arrears of pay. He was unattractive, with a deformed spine and pinched face, and seemed to have had no confiding friendships, no leisure, no love. About half-way through, Jardine changes direction to concentrate on Hooke the physical man." - Diana Souhami, The Independent
  
  
• "However, it is the public Hooke who matters most here, and he is well served by Jardine, who richly restores to him his due, at the same time adding another stimulating chapter to the history of a great century and its spectacular achievements." - A.C.Grayling, Literary Review
  
  
• "Ultimately, we cannot really grasp who the man was, and the existing, lizard-like portrait is not much help, either; for this may not be Hooke at all, although Jardine makes a fairly strong case for it. His elusiveness may owe something to the structure of this book. It is arranged more by themes than chronology, and the private life is tucked at the end rather than informing our view of the man as we read through. And though this is a good, thorough, sympathetic biography, it lacks two things: a feel for the age -- the colour and smell and mood of it -- and a sense of the excitement of scientific discovery." - Ann Wroe, New Statesman
  
  
• "Hooke's range is breathtaking, and Jardine gives us a wonderful sense of the pace of his life as he drugged himself into frenzied sleeplessness and coldly listed his own symptoms. (...) Her well-documented presentation of Hooke's relations with the scientific community of a late-17th-century London he helped to reshape is a tour de force -- social history as well as biography." - Derek Hirst, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "(H)er meticulously researched, engrossing book tells the tale of an eternal backroom boy. Her Robert Hooke is a great and generous collaborator, whose assistance was crucial to the development of Robert Boyle's pneumatology, Christopher Wren's architecture and, perhaps, even Newton's physics, but whose very generosity crippled him from attaching his own name to these achievements until it was too late." - Jonathan Heawood, The Observer
  
  
• "Jardine has immense affection for her subject and her biography fizzes with enthusiasm. Sometimes her lavishly illustrated book seems oddly structured: the impact of Micrographia, for example, is discussed fairly late, even though it was published at the start of Hooke's career. In general, however, this is a fine memorial to a man of astounding ingenuity who never quite attained greatness. Jardine cannot make Hooke wholly likeable, but her scholarly and lively account admirably captures his versatility." - Anne Somerset, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "(E)xcellent and beautifully illustrated" - Lewis Wolpert, The Times
  
  
• "(H)er lucid and easy-reading prose paints a vivid portrait of a curiously overlooked historical figure." - Henry Petroski, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was a leading scientific figure of his time, but -- so Jardine -- "has faded, over time from the public's imagination." An eponymous law (Hooke's law of elasticity), a prominent role in the Royal Society, and his part as -- as Jardine's subtitle has it -- The Man Who Measured London after the Great Fire are what he is best remembered for, but Jardine feels that he hasn't gotten his due and wants with this book nothing less than to:

retrieve Hooke and his genius, and give him back the status he undoubtedly deserves today, as a groundbreaking thinker and brilliant experimentalist, a founding figure in the European scientific revolution.

All things to all men, he had neither the opportunity nor perhaps the inclination to pursue any of the many interesting fields into which he was drawn on behalf of others, so as to see any major project through to completion, or to stick with any knotty mathematical problem through to its solution.

I doe bequeath & give to my good friends A, B, C, & D. my whole Estate Real & Personal

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Links:

• HarperCollins publicity page

• Boston Globe
• The Guardian
• H-Albion
• Kirkus Reviews
• The Observer
• Publishers Weekly
• The Washington Post

• Robert Hooke site

• Profile in The Observer

• Neal Stephenson's novel Quicksilver, in which Hooke figures prominently
• See Index of Biographical books
• See Index of Science and Technology books

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About the Author:

       British scholar Lisa Jardine was born in 1944 and died in 2015.

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© 2004-2022 the complete review

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