As authors Desmond MacHale and Yvonne Cohen explain, this book complements MacHale's 1985 biography of George Boole, and it is devoted to things for which Boole is not famous. MacHale and Cohen have uncovered a mass of material about Boole's private life as a teacher and textbook writer, as a poet, as a social reformer, and as a religious and philosophical thinker. They also delve more deeply than previous studies into Boole's relationships with other mathematicians. They include an abundance of contemporary illustrations, and a rich and vivid portrait of the man emerges.

The book is organized chronologically for the most part and can therefore be read in its own right as a biography of Boole. MacHale and Cohen introduce Boole via what is called the Family History Notebook, the text of which is reproduced and which seems to have been written by Boole's eldest daughter, Mary Ellen. Then they present “MaryAnn's Biographical Memoir of George Boole,” a reminiscence by his sister MaryAnn Boole, which is also published here for the first time. Two more biographical chapters follow before half a dozen devoted to individual friends and correspondents of Boole, after which the book concludes with an epilogue on his death, almost sixty pages of Booleana, and an extensive treatment of the suggestion, first made by others, that Boole was the inspiration for Conan Doyle's creation of Moriarty. MacHale and Cohen endorse this idea, although they generously admit that there are other plausible candidates for the honor.

The picture we have of Boole, much of it created by MacHale's earlier book, is not significantly altered here, but it is significantly enriched. We learn of Boole's attempts to keep in touch with British mathematics from his position in Cork through his letters to old friends back in Lincolnshire, where he had grown up. We also learn that soon after arriving in Ireland, Boole formed strong opinions about various Catholic religious and political opinions, views he was careful to conceal in his lifetime. For instance, he was opposed to the ultra-montane faction, composed of people who wanted the pope to rule over kings and governments even in temporal matters. Instead, he was drawn to unconventional religious thinkers and to social reformers generally.

Unavoidably, the book conveys something of Boole's attitude to mathematics. For example, in letters to his friend Joseph Hill, he argued that mathematics can be used to obtain truths what we might otherwise have been able to obtain only through “some unknown intuition of revelation” (165). Math, he says, trains the mind, but at a cost: its exclusive study will “deaden the imagination and destroy the relish for elegant literature and indispose the mind for everything but the bare pursuit of abstract truths” (165). Whether this was because of the nature of mathematical study or the intensity and abstract nature of thought required he could not say, although he held out the prospect that all might eventually be made easy and free of such risks.

New Light on Boole offers a textually well-sourced, highly readable picture of provincial British life. Precisely because Boole lived in a remote part of Ireland, his letters and still more people's replies to them tell us a lot about the great causes of his time, as well as the daily business of life. The remarkable amount of information conveyed by this study amplifies our picture of a man who became, after his death, one of the more influential figures of Victorian mathematics.