The remnants of people's lives-scientific eureka moments, poetry, sculpture, social reform, refinements on what came before-provide the impetus for travelling into personalities and circumstances, a process of discovery for author and reader alike. Who did they love, and how? Within the constraints of society, where were the niches of freedom? What opportunities and intersections pulsated and solidified to form the crucibles in which discovery happens and by which future generations can still marvel and make use of their ideas, achievements, writings, images, and breakthroughs? Deeply personal underlying questions from Popova provide a means of connecting a singular person's talents and drives with the forces of the time in which they lived. Readers familiar with her online newsletter Brain Pickings will recognize her methodology primarily associational, contextual, inquisitive, and compassionate, she imbues her subjects with more than chronology and lists of achievements, burrowing into significant fortunes and misfortunes of individuals, family, communities, and world events-and their shapings on creative life. Astonishing in heft (almost 600 pages), in scope (lives, works, and milieu of selected European and American scientists, artists, and public intellectuals), and in articulation (attending as much to language and imaginative association as biographical fact), Maria Popova's Figuring is an ode to the quality of astonishment itself.
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