A clear-eyed look at a fascinating man who left an unmistakable—if mixed—stamp upon the world we live in.
Biologist Brookes (Fly, 2001, etc.) pens a popular life of Darwin’s cousin, the inventor of eugenics.
The youngest child of a Quaker banker, and the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, Francis Galton (1822–1911) came from a family with strong claims to scientific eminence. At age four, he could read anything in English, knew the rudiments of Latin and French, and had made a solid start on mathematics. At his father’s urging he began medical studies before entering Cambridge to read mathematics. Independently wealthy after his father’s death, he mounted an expedition into southwest Africa, exploring hostile desert country without a single life lost. He returned home to honors from the Royal Geographic Society, wrote the bestselling Art of Travel, and married Louisa Butler, daughter of an eminent intellectual family. Now his long interest in mathematics and statistics re-emerged. He invented the weather map as we know it today and discovered the anti-cyclone weather pattern. Darwin’s Origin of Species convinced him that the human race might be improved in the same way as breeds of domestic animals, by encouraging only the best specimens to breed. The author shows how Galton’s idée fixe, despite initial resistance from his scientific peers, became by the end of his life a widely accepted scheme for the betterment of society. Galton’s own snobbism, along with the racism and chauvinism of his era, was undoubtedly a major ingredient in his advocacy of eugenics, which came to serve as justification for unspeakable evils. At the same time, Brookes points out, his focus on genetic determinism laid the ground for the modern science of genetics, which may eventually have a greater positive impact on the world than anything Galton claimed eugenics could achieve.
A clear-eyed look at a fascinating man who left an unmistakable—if mixed—stamp upon the world we live in.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-481-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
