by Philip Ball ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2004
A highly provocative work of popular science.
Can human nature be reduced to a set of laws that can then be used to organize society? By this intriguing account, many a physicist is now exploring such a question.
Apply a law to individual humans, and you’ll likely end up with more exceptions than rules. But perhaps, suggests British science writer Ball (The Ingredients, 2003, etc.), the terms haven’t been correctly expressed: human nature is more a collective than an individual matter, so the task is to describe the workings of the crowd, such that “we can make predictions about society even in the face of individual free will.” Opening his inquiry with Thomas Hobbes, who proposed a mechanistic model of humankind in his much-despised Leviathan, Ball touches on some unsettling questions: Are we merely drones in a big hive? Is there such a thing as free will? (Probably: Ball points to “many examples of social behavior in which a kind of regularity and order comes not from any predestination in the fates of the participants but from the very limited range of their viable choices.”) Writing with his customary light hand, and drawing on very recent developments in things like chaos and network theory, Ball looks at some of those examples to see what scientists think about why we do the things we do. Why, for instance, are there traffic jams? (Because the universe is rife with anomalies and random perturbations.) Why do economic systems—the stock market, say—resist behaving in always predictable ways? (Ditto, and “the fluctuations are unavoidable.”) Why do wars erupt, and why do some wars stay small and manageable while others kill millions? (Ditto, and therefore “there can be no telling how big a conflict might be sparked by the smallest disturbance.”) Ball’s survey raises more questions than it answers, but one fascinating constant emerges: “Regardless of what we believe about the motivations for individual behavior, once we become part of a group we cannot be sure what to expect.”
A highly provocative work of popular science.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-28125-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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