Geneviéve Rodis-Lewis is uniquely qualified to celebrate René Descartes. This major intellectual biography illuminates the personal and historical events of Descartes's life, from his birth and early years in France to his death in Sweden, his burial, and the fate of his remains. Concerned not only with historical events but also with the development of Descartes's personality, Rodis-Lewis speculates on the effect childhood impressions may have had on his philosophy and scientific theories. She considers in detail his friendships, particularly with Isaac Beeckman and Marin Mersenne. Primarily on the basis of his private correspondence, Rodis-Lewis gives a thorough and balanced discussion of his personality. The Descartes she depicts is by turns generous and unforgiving, arrogant and open-minded, loyal in his friendship but eager for the isolation his work required. Rodis-Lewis clarifies Descartes's school days, his family's circumstances and social status, the location of the famous "stove" where Descartes first discovered the foundations of his science, his military life, and the birth and death of his daughter. She is careful to point out the gaps that remain in the record of Descartes's life. Drawing on Descartes's writings and his public and private correspondence, she corrects the errors of earlier biographies and clarifies many obscure episodes in the philosopher's life. This biography was published in France in 1995, the same year that another masterly study appeared in this country (Stephen Gaukroger's Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, LJ 4/1/95). There has been a resurgence of interest in this philosopher, and with good reason: Descartes is generally acknowledged as a pivotal figure in the transition from medieval to modern thinking about the world. This biography, written by a Frenchwoman (professor emerita at the Sorbonne) who has been immersed in Cartesian studies for decades, gives us a portrait of Descartes that perhaps only a compatriot could. The author is so familiar with her subject that she refers to him often as Ren?, and the story of his life and interests is rendered in as much intimate detail as can be derived from his extensive correspondence, which the author principally relies on to bring her subject to life. She shows him "warts and all," and Descartes emerges as a living presence rather than merely a historical figure. A good purchase for academic libraries, to complement the Gaukroger book.ALeon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washington, DC Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. This relatively compact biography of the seventeenth-century French philosopher is determined to reverse the slander of scandal in vogue among Descartes' recent biographers and to modify the view of his intellectual development. Rodis-Lewis bristles at the recently advanced image of Descartes as a famous libertine, taking pains to note, for example, that his affections for a particular male companion were entirely brotherly. Drawing frequently on Descartes' correspondence, Rodis-Lewis quarrels with previous accounts of his college training, and traces his early dismay with the Jesuit scholastic method and his movement through mathematics and on to metaphysics. She then focuses on the development of Descartes' philosophical method, which he hoped might be learned and practiced by everyday readers (to which end he wrote Discourse on Method in French, not the more elite Latin); on his difficult intellectual (and sometimes political) battles; and lastly on his study of passions, and his related sympathy for and efforts on behalf of some convicted criminals. She openly champions a newly respectable, if not altogether equable, Descartes, one driven by a search for truth. Jim O'Laughlin A detailed scholarly biography of one of the intellectual founders of the modern world, by a distinguished French scholar, the second after Stephen Gaukroger's 1995 ``intellectual biography.'' Every educated person knows Descartes's one famous line (``cogito, ergo sum''); but the full story of what he thought and who he was is less familiar. Rodis-Lewis, professor emeritus at the Sorbonne and a winner of the Grand Prix of the Acadmie Franaise, undertakes to repair that deficiency. Born in 1596, Descartes was the son of a well-to-do lawyer. His training in mathematics and philosophy came at the remarkably egalitarian Jesuit-run College of La Fleche (in Paris); even at that stage, he insisted on finding things out for himself, and read widely in subjects outside the normal curriculum, including alchemy and astrology. Rodis-Lewis often disagrees with previous biographers on the effect of these readings on his mature philosophy. At age 21, he joined the army (the Thirty Years War was just beginning), hoping to see the world; and for most of the next two decades, Descartes returned to France only rarely, living primarily in the Netherlands. His voluminous correspondence made him a familiar figure in th