A pleasing, entertaining sojourn into the realm of what makes us tick.
The intrepid explorer and popular travel writer journeys inward—literally—to explore our mortal coil.
A narrative by Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, 2016, etc.) rarely involves the unfolding of a grand thesis; instead, it’s a congeries of anecdotes, skillfully strung, always a pleasure to read but seldom earthshakingly significant. So it is here. The author does some on-the-ground digging, talking to scientists and physicians, while plowing through libraries of literature to get at the story of how our bodies work. Early on, he pokes at the old bromide that the human body is an assemblage of a few dollars’ worth of assorted chemicals and minerals. Not so, he writes: We’re made up of 59 elements, including carbon and oxygen. But, he adds, “who would have thought that we would be incomplete without some molybdenum inside us, or vanadium, manganese, tin, and copper?” Bryson employs the example of an “obliging Benedict Cumberbatch,” of medium height and build and good health, to venture that the real cost of a human is “a very precise $151,578.46,” a figure that turns out to wiggle and wobble as we layer on additional costs. As ever, the author collects lovely oddments and presents them as so many glittering marbles: The largest protein in the body is titin, whose “chemical name is 189,819 letters long, which would make it the longest word in the English language except that dictionaries don’t recognize chemical names.” The heart, which, Bryson notes, doesn’t really look like a valentine, does only one thing: It beats, “slightly more than once every second, about 100,000 times a day, up to 2.5 billion times in a lifetime.” Along the way, the author considers whether the old surgical practice of bleeding was really a good thing to do (it wasn’t), how "cytokine storms” work, and what the winning combination is for a long life—one factor is wealth: “Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor…can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner.”
A pleasing, entertaining sojourn into the realm of what makes us tick.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53930-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A riveting look inside the human brain and its quirks.
Acclaimed British neurologist Sacks (Neurology and Psychiatry/Columbia Univ.; The Mind’s Eye, 2010, etc.) delves into the many different sorts of hallucinations that can be generated by the human mind.
The author assembles a wide range of case studies in hallucinations—seeing, hearing or otherwise perceiving things that aren’t there—and the varying brain quirks and disorders that cause them in patients who are otherwise mentally healthy. In each case, he presents a fascinating condition and then expounds on the neurological causes at work, drawing from his own work as a neurologist, as well as other case studies, letters from patients and even historical records and literature. For example, he tells the story of an elderly blind woman who “saw” strange people and animals in her room, caused by Charles Bonnet Syndrome, a condition in with the parts of the brain responsible for vision draw on memories instead of visual perceptions. In another chapter, Sacks recalls his own experimentation with drugs, describing his auditory hallucinations. He believed he heard his neighbors drop by for breakfast, and he cooked for them, “put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into the living room—and found it completely empty.” He also tells of hallucinations in people who have undergone prolonged sensory deprivation and in those who suffer from Parkinson’s disease, migraines, epilepsy and narcolepsy, among other conditions. Although this collection of disorders feels somewhat formulaic, it’s a formula that has served Sacks well in several previous books (especially his 1985 bestseller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), and it’s still effective—largely because Sacks never turns exploitative, instead sketching out each illness with compassion and thoughtful prose.
A riveting look inside the human brain and its quirks.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95724-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Deeply thought-provoking and unexpectedly lyrical.
From the author of The Myth of Sanity (2001), a remarkable philosophical examination of the phenomenon of sociopathy and its everyday manifestations.
Readers eager for a tabloid-ready survey of serial killers, however, will be disappointed. Instead, Stout (Psychiatry/Harvard Medical School) busies herself with exploring the workaday lives and motivations of those garden-variety sociopaths who are content with inflicting petty tyrannies and small miseries. As a practicing therapist, she writes, she has spent the past 25 years aiding the survivors of psychological trauma, most of them “controlled and psychologically shattered by individual human perpetrators, often sociopaths.” Antisocial personality disorder, it turns out, occurs in around four percent of the population, so it’s not too surprising that treating their victims has kept Stout quite busy for the past quarter-century. Employing vivid composite character sketches, the author introduces us to such unsavory characters as a psychiatric administrator who specializes in ingratiating herself with her office staff while making her patients feel crazier; a captain of industry who killed frogs as a child and is now convinced he can outsmart the SEC; and a lazy ladies’ man who marries purely to gain access to his new wife’s house and pool. These portraits make a striking impact, and readers with unpleasant neighbors or colleagues may find themselves paying close attention to Stout’s sociopathic-behavior checklist and suggested coping strategies. In addition to introducing these everyday psychopaths, the author examines why the rest of us let them get away with murder. She extensively considers the presence or absence of conscience, as well as our discomfort with questioning those seen as being in power. Stout also ponders our willingness to quash our inner voice when voting for leaders who espouse violence and war as a solution to global problems—pointed stuff in a post-9/11 political climate.
Deeply thought-provoking and unexpectedly lyrical.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-7679-1581-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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