A fascinating catalog of ancient cultures and unique geological events.
Exploring the borderlands between myth, history, and science.
Folklorist and historian Mayor, author of the National Book Award finalist The Poison King, draws on the new field of geomythology to explain the historical background and science behind 53 legends and myths of the earth and “how humans have made sense of their observations of nature over time.” The oral legend of the Budj Bim volcano in Australia may go back more than 36,000 years and can help scientists understand seismic, volcanic, and other geological events. The many tales of fountains of flames and perpetually burning fires can help scientists trace the earth’s hydrocarbon degassing into the atmosphere. The ancient tales of West Africa’s terrible, gigantic Jobar creature, which perished in an ancient flash flood, were confirmed in 1997 by the discovery of a new species of sauropod dinosaurs. The giant lake catfish of Japanese legend, the Namazu, were known for predicting earthquakes and tsunamis; its image now graces Japanese escape route signs. Legends about numerous Paleoburrows in Brazil, formed long ago, were created by giant sloths and massive armadillos, say paleontologists. Contemporary urban myths have sprung up around the Rat Hole of Chicago, an impression of a rat in a concrete sidewalk. It probably escaped from wet concrete. Then there are the legends of Bahrain’s 32-foot Shajarat-al-Hayat, or Tree of Life, being part of the Garden of Eden. Scientists now believe it was planted around 1582. Mayor concludes her catalog of worldly wonders with the study of zooseismology—yes, it seems animals do have the ability to sense seismic activity before humans. Other entries cover dry quicksand, raining frogs and fish, killing stones, and windblown strands of spun glass.
A fascinating catalog of ancient cultures and unique geological events.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780691247861
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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