Descartes' Bones

Praise

"Many strains of thought converge around Descartes and his physical remains.... Mr. Shorto has used them as the basis of an investigative book...[that] attest to Mr. Shorto’s intellectual adventurousness and dogged curiosity....Mr. Shorto leaps from one intriguing topic to another, doing it with verve... His insights are keen. And he is as drawn to great, overarching ideas as he is to historical factoids. Descartes’ posthumous journey happens to be rich with both."--Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"[A] smart, elegantly written.....feat of intellectual of intellectual story-telling"
--The New York Times Book Review

"Shorto will pull in readers who enjoy a good history mystery seasoned with philosophical thoughts."
--Booklist

“With the fascinating Descartes' Bones, Russell Shorto has produced another compelling intellectual detective story, one that illuminates the present as much as the dusty past.”
—Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine

"This is a beguiling book about the architecture of the way we live now. As Russell Shorto points out, Descartes is claimed by both the ferociously secular and the ferociously religious, but the truth is more complicated. The sooner we recognize that the world is too wild to be reduced to glib categorization, Shorto writes, the sooner we may be able to find ways to talk to, rather than yell at, one another."
—Jon Meacham, author of Franklin and Winston and American Gospel

"A fascinating, colorful, and very readable account of early modern ideas and personalities. Shorto has a gift for storytelling. He brings the seventeenth century to life while doing justice to the philosophy."
—Professor Steven Nadler, author of Rembrandt's Jews and Spinoza: A Life