The 300th birthday of the 18th-century French noblewoman, scientist, freethinker (she considered Jesus "a pious fraud") and paramour of Voltaire brings the second new biography. David Bodanis's Passionate Minds
presents her life essentially as a romance novel. Historian Zinsser (A History of Their Own
) says more about her subject's scientific work, which groped toward a modern conception of kinetic energy and included an influential recasting of Newton's work on the calculus. Du Châtelet (1706-1749) was certainly an emblematic, if not quite pivotal, figure in the ferment of 18th-century European science and philosophy, and her works could ground an illuminating and accessible intellectual history of the age, but they demand a more systematic treatment than Zinsser gives them. She has a surer footing on social and cultural history, as she surveys the ancien régime's caste system and court protocol at Versailles and regales readers with details of du Châtelet's luxurious wardrobe and household furnishings, as well as her struggle for acceptance by the male scientific establishment. All this makes for an enjoyable study of an unusual woman and feminist pioneer, but du Châtelet still awaits a biography that does full justice to her ideas. Photos. (Dec. 4)
