Dean’s long and varied experience in the world of science reporting makes for an articulate, well-structured, and easily...
That “the human mind is a sink of irrationality” is the assumption behind this engagingly written guidebook.
New York Times science writer Dean (Writer in Residence/Brown Univ.) previously approached this situation from another tack in Am I Making Myself Clear?: A Scientist’s Guide to Talking to the Public (2012). Here, she aims to help the public deal with “a world in which researchers gather data, politicians, business executives, or activists spin it, journalists misinterpret or hype it, and the rest of us don’t get it.” Not only are we irrational, but we are mostly ignorant about science, and Dean explores both the reasons and the effects, including our erroneous ideas about probability and risk. With dozens of examples, many from recent events, she explains how science is taught or not taught in schools (nearly a third of science teachers are creationists), how scientific research works, how it is financed, and how it is influenced by politics and religion. Among the many topics Dean introduces are climate change, genetically modified organisms, organic foods, cancer screenings, cloning claims, genome engineering, medical malpractice litigation, misconduct of researchers, and the defects of cost-benefit analysis. She also reveals the disconnects between science and law and between science and religion. Advice for the nonscientist abounds—e.g., don’t accept anything at face value, consider the source, beware of stories about trends, and keep in mind that the plural of “anecdote” is not “evidence.” For patients facing treatment decisions, Dean even provides lists of questions to ask the doctor. Her summarizing list of recommendations for nonscientists includes the admonition to acknowledge ignorance and uncertainty, to consider other views by sources outside one’s comfort zone, and when it comes to conclusions, consider it again.
Dean’s long and varied experience in the world of science reporting makes for an articulate, well-structured, and easily understood account filled with good stories and sound advice.Pub Date: March 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-05969-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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