Fascinating and important material, though it deserves better exposition.
A leading neurologist and critically praised science writer (The Feeling of What Happens, 1999, etc.) argues that research on human emotions supports the 17th-century philosopher’s conclusions about the mind-body problem.
Damasio (Neurology/Univ. of Iowa Medical Center) begins by describing his visit to Spinoza's home and grave in the Hague. Spinoza's ideas, the author reminds us, were so radical that they were suppressed for decades after his death in 1677, though they survived to be picked up by Enlightenment thinkers and to influence many modern scientists. At the center of his philosophy was the assertion that the mind, and by implication the soul, was not separate from the body but intimately connected to it. At this point, Damasio launches into a detailed summary of the neurological evidence that emotions and feelings, which he carefully distinguishes, arise directly from the brain's imaging of the body’s physical states. Studies of patients with injuries to discrete areas of the brain indicate that specific sites are responsible for specific emotional states, he notes. Moreover, the chemical and physical events leading to feelings can often be traced with considerable accuracy. Unfortunately, the author’s account of these potentially revolutionary investigations is highly abstract and couched in reader-unfriendly jargon. The evidence seems to be that even such exalted emotions as altruism and civic responsibility can be accounted for by physical processes based in the evolutionary needs of the human organism to survive and reproduce. The feeling of contentment that follows ethical behavior is similar to those called up by acts that directly benefit the organism. Having made these points, the narrative returns to an account of Spinoza's life, with particular emphasis on his estrangement from the Portuguese Sephardic community in the Netherlands and his impact on later thinkers. The Spinoza sections flow smoothly; this would have been far more valuable if the neurological sections were as clear and engaging. Even so, it will reward close study.
Fascinating and important material, though it deserves better exposition.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-100557-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Delivers an avalanche of information with enough lucidity and enthusiasm to captivate not only aviation buffs, but general...
A surprisingly entertaining account of the helicopter: part history, part technical exploration, part flying lesson.
Science writer Chiles (Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology, 2001) points out that rotating wings, not propellers, produced mankind’s first flying machine. The earliest, boomerangs, have turned up in ancient sites 20,000 years old. The first powered aircraft was a toy-like device whose whirling rotors raised it into the air above Paris on April 28, 1784. Despite this head start, Orville Wright made man’s first powered flight 20 years before the first helicopter wobbled unsteadily off the ground—because, Chiles explains, helicopters are much trickier than fixed-wing aircraft. Not until the 1930s did engineers realize that a simple propeller may lift a craft into the air, but it then becomes wildly unstable. A rotor must flex freely but also be damped to prevent too much flexion. To make matters more complicated, moving the helicopter through the sky safely requires subtly changing the angle of the rotor blades and the speed of the engine. The solution to these problems produced a wonderfully useful but expensive contraption. Chiles is at his best describing the persistent, often wacky efforts to persuade Americans to replace the family car with a dazzling machine whose lowest price is currently about $350,000. Aside from the wealthy, the helicopter’s cost and complexities render it unprofitable as a personal transportation vehicle. The Coast Guard, major hospitals, TV stations, police departments and other organizations with big budgets, however, make superb use of its ability to observe, hover and rescue. In the military, where money is no object, it has produced a revolution, delivering firepower from the air more accurately than a bomber and landing troops more efficiently than parachutes.
Delivers an avalanche of information with enough lucidity and enthusiasm to captivate not only aviation buffs, but general readers as well.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-553-80447-8
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Contrary to its title, this book is not about the future of warfare, but rather the types of war the author expects the US to get involved in next. Sections of Alexander's (Lost Victories: The Military Genius of Stonewall Jackson, 1992, etc.) far-flung book deal miscellaneously with Korea, Mao's military theories, Lawrence of Arabia, the Boer War, and Vietnam. The two chapters about Vietnam vividly describe lesser-known engagements that capture, as the author sees it, much of what went wrong there. On the important question of the extent to which regular North Vietnamese troops increasingly fought a conventional war, the author argues that the main purpose of the regular units was to draw US forces into the highlands, leaving the more populated parts of the country vulnerable to the Vietcong. Alexander makes the very striking claim that the Vietcong carried the main burden of the fighting from first to last. Regrettably, when it comes to the future, Alexander falls into the age-old rut of assuming that the next major war will be essentially much like the last—that is, almost certainly ``low intensity'' conflicts rather like Vietnam—though he also allows for the possibility of a war for hegemony over Eurasia or even, it seems, a major naval war. Worse still, while one may argue about whether the disintegration of the USSR has left the US more or less secure, its seems more than a little odd to say, as Alexander does, that we face no threat from Russia—an unstable country that still has the nuclear power to obliterate us. On Yugoslavia, the most controversial military question facing the US today, the author tellingly has nothing to say. While some chapters here would make good magazine articles, as a whole the book lacks perspective, and with its silence on the human catastrophe in Bosnia, it fails the key test of relevance.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03780-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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