“Words, words, words,” said Hamlet—that brilliant, verbose Dane would find in these pages a most welcome elaboration.
The author of Thinking in Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math (2013, etc.) shows us that language is a far more ornately feathered fowl than casual consideration can conceive.
Tammet begins with probably the most engaging and revealing section of his entire text: an account of how he, born with “high-functioning autism,” learned language, a process involving numbers, colors, poems, and a most fecund imagination. He also shows us—more or less indirectly—the fatuousness of teaching methods that assume and presume that everyone learns in the same way (think: our current obsession with standardized testing). Tammet’s directly autobiographical accounts slip into the background as he encourages us to follow him on a kind of intellectual circumnavigation of Planet Language. These chapters cover such subjects as the status of Esperanto, people who write in disappearing languages, political attempts to prevent the language from altering too much, sign language, translation, and conversations with computers. A particularly moving segment involves the study of telephone language—the grammar, the protocols, the unexpected intimacies—a study that led, in one case, to a staged reading of When Cancer Calls, a performance of transcripts of cancer-related calls among family members. The author sometimes tells us more than we may want to know: the section on Esperanto, are overlong, and some of his fascinations with the details of translation will delight, well, translators. It seems he is often determined to tell us the histories of things at the expense of our patience. But there are many moments of delightful and surprising luminescence. In his section about the telephone, he notes how ordinary words and deep emotion are “the freight of every family’s telephone line.”
“Words, words, words,” said Hamlet—that brilliant, verbose Dane would find in these pages a most welcome elaboration.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-35305-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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