A captivating scholarly analysis hampered by uneven prose.
Negre considers the possibility that modern cosmological theory underwrites a unity of mind and matter.
The tendency of modern science has been disciplinary self-isolation. Questions of religion and culture—and any talk about the human soul—have been relegated to the realm of the irrational or the poetic. In his debut English-language book, the author proposes a unification of the three—a kind of spiritually infused science that seeks to recombine matter and mind into a psychophysical unity. He interrogates the psychology of Jung and the physics of Wolfgang Ernest Pauli in order to find a basis for that unity. The two research scientists, despite their often disparate approaches, corresponded often, and their intellectual collaboration culminated in a joint book, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. At the heart of their examination is number—while contemporary physics depends heavily on mathematics, it narrowly conceives of number as merely quantitative. This is a departure from ancient philosophical traditions that interpreted number as qualitatively significant as well and the fundamental organizing element of reality. Along these lines, Pauli discusses number as the “primary probability” and Jung as the “most primitive element of order in the human mind.” Negre explores their thoughts to find a way in which the numerical structure of the universe is symbolically represented within the zodiac and functions like a collective unconscious, a source of projections that shape people’s common conception of the cosmos, including at the level of scientific theory. The author’s scholarly expertise is redoubtable—he leaps self-assuredly from discussions of Proclus to Heraclitus to Hegel. In addition, he rightfully brings attention to a philosophical friendship that has been unjustly neglected. But the study won’t function as a prefatory introduction for the uninitiated, despite its brevity—Negre’s insistence on employing the murkiest of academic jargon limits the book’s accessibility. Furthermore, the prose is elusive even for those familiar with the material, needlessly dense and serpentine: “Numbers also arouse unconscious resonances. Their ineradicable primitive fundamental quality of ordering can re-emerge only through the re-connection that is reconstituted in the interpretation of the theory or model.”
A captivating scholarly analysis hampered by uneven prose.Pub Date: April 11, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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 2025 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.
