No-frills intellectual history for the lay reader.
A priest/paleontologist’s fraught efforts to reconcile the theory of evolution with his faith.
Aczel (The Artist and the Mathematician: The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed, 2006, etc.) doesn’t bother much with biographical detail in this proficient account of Teilhard de Chardin’s role in the international quest for a “missing link” that would demonstrate the evolutionary ties between apes and humans. Ordained in 1911, Chardin did not believe that his devout Catholicism required him to ignore the period’s rapid advances in science. He had experienced those advances firsthand as a participant in exciting fossil discoveries in Egypt, in French caves and on digs in China with Rockefeller-funded fossil-hunter Davidson Black. The new field of paleoanthropology was emerging, Aczel shows, driven by discoveries of the fossils of three hominids inhabiting the world at overlapping periods: Homo sapiens (Cro-Magnon Man), Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal) and Homo erectus (Java Man). A spectacular example of erectus was discovered in 1929 by Chardin and the David crew in China’s Zhoukoudian caves. There they unearthed the fossil dubbed Peking Man—“as typical a link between man and the apes as one could wish for,” the priest wrote exultantly. (This vital find, along with many other fossils, vanished in 1941 during the Japanese occupation of China.) Chardin extensively considered the relationship of science and religion in his books, which attempted to prove that “God works through evolutionary processes to propel humanity ever forward.” His ideas continually got him into trouble with his Jesuit superiors, who essentially exiled him to America. Aczel manipulates an enormous amount of material in an orderly fashion, and his admiration for Chardin’s humanity is evident.
No-frills intellectual history for the lay reader.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59448-956-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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