"J. B. Shank’s project is ambitious: to debunk the myth of the French Enlightenment as the direct intellectual descendant of Isaac Newton. For Shank, there was nothing inevitable about the uses made in France of Newton’s work.....This is a good book, well researched and readable....In this light, the major virtue of Shank’s study is not that it offers an entirely new interpretation of the origins of the French Enlightenment, but that it provides a novel perspective on traditional accounts."

Christopher Baxfield | British Journal for the History of Science

"It will be a long time before anyone seeks to replace the thoroughness of Shank’s scholarship. He manages to allow the polemics around Newton’s science to unfold until we begin to see that it was the polemic itself that generated enlightened thought. This is not what Newton’s opponents had in mind, but as Shank brilliantly demonstrates, it is exactly what they got."

Margaret C. Jacob | American Historical Review

"A complex tale documented from hundreds of sources, this definitive stury is well worth a central plaace in studies in intellectual history."

Choice

"This is a really important book because it helps us rethink the important early part of Voltaire's career. . . . What J B Shank does is to give a much more nuanced understanding of how Voltaire is trying to make his career in that early period. It's the most important new insight into Voltaire's intellectual evolution to come out for the last generation."

Nicholas Cronk | Five Books