Cosmic Crusader The life of a little-known philosopher with some very big ideas.

Reviewed by Marc Kaufman Sunday, August 10, 2008; BW04 GIORDANO BRUNO Philosopher/Heretic By Ingrid D. Rowland Farrar Straus Giroux. 335 pp. $27 (forthcoming August 26) In Rome's Campo de' Fiore, a square bustling with restaurants, markets and charmed visitors, stands a bronze statue of a man in a friar's habit and cowl, arms crossed, looking down with great sorrow. A plaque says simply, "To Bruno, from the generation he foresaw, here, where the pyre burned." To those relatively few who know who Bruno was, the somber monument and its enigmatic inscription capture well the life being memorialized. Giordano Bruno -- philosopher, cosmologist and master of memory techniques -- was, in the Papal Jubilee year of 1600, burned at the stake in that square for the crime of obstinate heresy. A former Dominican priest with no political ambitions, no history of violence or subversion and no real following beyond a few scholars at some obscure universities, Bruno was tried and condemned by the Inquisition for what he thought, wrote and said. And while some view him as the world's first martyr to science -- a free thinker punished for holding a distinctly modern view of the cosmos -- Bruno was no Galileo or Copernicus. He was, instead, a

serious man with expansive views on the nature of God and the universe who had the misfortune of living during a time when Catholic orthodoxy was being challenged and the church was fighting back. Nonetheless, he and his death have inspired a range of notable people such as Baruch Spinoza (who shared parts of Bruno's philosophy and was also excommunicated by his people), Gottfried Leibniz, James Joyce (who alludes to Bruno often in Finnegans Wake) and Umberto Eco. Ingrid D. Rowland's new biography of him is well timed -- not so much because the kind of intellectual intolerance that led to his death is rising (it isn't, at least in the West), but because some of his more visionary and intriguing ideas have a new relevance. In particular, Bruno was among the first to write about the universe as infinite in both time and space. He also was entirely comfortable with the idea that the universe contains many worlds and that some of the others might well be inhabited. This kind of thinking has given rise to astrobiology, the multidisciplinary science behind a concerted and well-financed effort to find life forms beyond Earth. Such a search would have no doubt delighted a man like Bruno, whose fascination with the workings of the universe and the possibility of life elsewhere turned him, in his era, into a tragic version of space visionary Arthur C. Clarke. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic gives some support to the view of Bruno as a visionary of and martyr to science, but Rowland, who teaches in Notre Dame's school of architecture in Rome and writes about Italian cultural history, knows too much about him and his times to accept that simple picture. Rather, she tells the story of a bright, thin-skinned, rebellious and inquisitive young man from outside Naples who became a precocious Dominican priest, had some

original thoughts, wrote some interesting treatises and long poems, and pretty quickly got in trouble with the authorities. He did untoward and, to the displeasure of his superiors, rather Protestant-like things, such as throwing out most of his religious and personal belongings and keeping a spare monastery cell. He fled Rome when he learned he might be brought before the Inquisition and for years moved around Europe, traveling from Toulouse and Paris to London and Oxford, from Frankfurt and Geneva to Padua (where he applied for an astronomy position that was later held by Galileo.) He gained and lost numerous university positions as well as royal and aristocratic benefactors across Europe before returning to Venice at the request of a wealthy young nobleman who wanted to learn Bruno's memory skills, which were based on mnemonic associations but were sometimes attributed to "magic." Bruno was handed over to the Inquisition after the young client concluded he wasn't getting the memory training he paid for, and Bruno spent the next eight years confined in Venice and then in Rome. Rowland describes in some detail the contorted -- but by the standards of the time entirely legal and accepted -- logic that led to Bruno being declared a heretic. His personal philosophy, which he called Nolan after the town where he was born, appeared to be a high-minded and exuberant distillation of Greek atomists (who saw the universe as infinite), St. Thomas of Aquinas (a fellow Dominican whose "natural theology" sought to prove the existence of God through philosophy), and Copernicus (who moved Earth out of its formerly central position in the universe), along with a view of God as within (as opposed to transcending) nature and man and a fondness for ancient Egypt . To the Inquisition, all this was dangerous and occult and outrageous.

Rowland's tale reads like an academic treatise at times, and it would be fascinating to know more about Bruno's personal life. But perhaps that's too much to ask, considering the times in which he lived and his peripatetic existence. Maybe it's enough simply to know more about the career of the brooding man whose statue looms over Campo de' Fiore. Marc Kaufman, a science writer for The Washington Post, is working on a book about astrobiology.

When China Starved By Anne Applebaum Tuesday, August 12, 2008; A13 Cymbals clashed; a giant scroll unfurled. There were fireworks, kites, "ancient soldiers" marching in formation, modern dancers bending their bodies into impossible shapes, astronauts, puppets, children, multiple high-tech gizmos. The Olympic opening ceremonies showed you China as China wants you to see it. But for a deeper understanding of how far China has come -- and of how odd its transformation continues to be -- switch off the Olympics. Instead, spend a few minutes contemplating the existence of a new book: the first proper history of China's Great Famine, a catastrophe partly engineered by the Chinese Communist Party and its first leader, Mao Zedong. "I call this book Tombstone," the author, Yang Jisheng, writes in the opening paragraph. "It is a tombstone for my father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book." "Tombstone" has not been translated. Nevertheless, rumors of its contents and short excerpts are already ricocheting around the world (I first learned of it recently in California, from an excited Australian historian). Based on a decade's worth of interviews and unprecedented access to documents and statistics, "Tombstone" -in two volumes and 1,100 pages -- establishes beyond any doubt that China's misguided charge toward industrialization -- Mao's "Great Leap Forward" -- was an utter disaster.

A combination of criminally bad policies (farmers were forced to make steel instead of growing crops; peasants were forced into unproductive communes) and official cruelty (China was grimly exporting grain at the time) created, between 1959 and 1961, one of the worst famines in recorded history. "I went to one village and saw 100 corpses," one witness told Yang. "Then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people." So thorough is his documentation, apparently, that some are already calling Yang "China's Solzhenitsyn," in honor of the Russian dissident -- who died last week -- who probably did the most to expose the crimes of Stalin. But the comparison is not quite right. Yang is not a dissident but a longtime Communist Party member. For more than three decades, he was a reporter for Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. As a result, he had access to party documents that no one else has ever had. More to the point, he is not an outsider: On the contrary, he, his book and the story of the famine itself have a status in China that is hard to define. Though the book is banned on the mainland, it was published in Hong Kong, where it sold out immediately. At the same time, while the famine officially didn't occur -- Chinese history textbooks speak of "three years of natural disasters," not of a mass artificial famine, caused by Chairman Mao -- many people clearly remember it well, understand Mao's role in what happened and are willing to discuss it in private. Like the communist legacy, the famine exists in a kind of limbo: undiscussed in public, unacknowledged by the state, yet a vivid part of popular memory. Because China is no longer a totalitarian

country, merely an authoritarian one, a journalist like Yang could spend 10 years working on the history of the famine, openly soliciting interviews and documents. But because the Chinese Communist Party neither openly embraces nor rejects the legacy of Mao -- his name was not mentioned during the Olympics' opening ceremonies, though his picture still hangs over the entrance to the Forbidden City -- there is no public discussion or debate. It's not hard to understand why this is so. If the Chinese Communist Party were to present an honest version of its past, its own legitimacy might come into question. Why, exactly, does a party with a history drenched in blood and suffering enjoy a monopoly on political power in China? Why does a nominally Marxist party, one whose economic theories proved utterly bankrupt in the past, still preside over an explosively capitalist society? Because there aren't any good answers to those questions, it is in the Chinese leadership's interest to make sure they don't get asked.