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Please join us at the Bookshop as we welcome Toby Lester, discussing his latest book, "Da Vinci's Ghost".

Toby Lester is a journalist, an editor, and an independent scholar. In addition to writing books, he is a longtime contributor to The Atlantic, for whom he has written extensively, on such topics as the reconstruction of ancient Greek music, the revisionist study of the Qur'an, and the attempt to change alphabets in Azerbaijan. Between 1995 and 2005 he worked for The Atlantic in a number of different editorial capacities—as a staff editor, as the executive editor of the website, as a senior editor, and as a managing editor. He has also served as the editor of Country Journal and the executive editor of DoubleTake. His writing has appeared in not only The Atlantic but also Smithsonian, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, The Wilson Quarterly, BBC News Magazine, and the London Times, as well as a number of anthologies, including the lead chapter of the recent New Literary History of America.

Prior to 1995, Lester worked in international relief and development: monitoring intifada-related activity in the West Bank, as a refugee-affairs officer for the United Nations; helping establish programs in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as a Peace Corps country desk officer; and teaching English in a mountain school, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Yemen. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1987 with degrees in English and French, and now lives in the Boston area with his wife and three daughters.

Lester comes from a family of writers. His father, James Lester, was a member of the first successful American Everest expedition, and is the author of Too Marvelous for Words (1994), the only biography of the jazz pianist Art Tatum. His mother, Valerie Lester, is the author of, among other works, Fasten Your Seat Belts: History and Heroism in the Pan Am Cabin (1995), and Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens (2004)—a biography of her great-great grandfather, Hablot Knight Browne, who was Charles Dickens’s principal illustrator. And his sister, Alison Lester, is the author of Locked Out (2007), a collection of short stories about expatriate life.

Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image (Hardcover)

By Toby Lester

$26.99

ISBN-13: 9781439189238
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Free Press, 2/2012

Other Editions of this Title

Toby Lester—the award-winning author of The Fourth Part of the World, celebrated by Simon Winchester as “a rare and masterly talent”—takes on one of the great untold stories in the history of ideas: the genesis of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

Everybody knows the picture: a man, meticulously rendered by Leonardo da Vinci, standing with arms and legs outstretched in a circle and a square. Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the grandeur of art, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit, the drawing turns up just about everywhere: in books, on coffee cups, on corporate logos, even on spacecraft. It has, in short, become the world’s most famous cultural icon—and yet almost nobody knows about the epic intellectual journeys that led to its creation. In this modest drawing that would one day paper the world, da Vinci attempted nothing less than to calibrate the harmonies of the universe and understand the central role man played in the cosmos.

Journalist and storyteller Toby Lester brings Vitruvian Man to life, resurrecting the ghost of an unknown Leonardo. Populated by a colorful cast of characters, including Brunelleschi of the famous Dome, Da Vinci’s Ghost opens up a surprising window onto the artist and philosopher himself and the tumultuous intellectual and cultural transformations he bridged. With sparkling prose and a rich variety of original illustrations, Lester captures the brief but momentous time in the history of western thought when the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, art and science and philosophy converged as one, and all seemed to hold out the promise that a single human mind, if properly harnessed, could grasp the nature of everything.

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