by David Kincaid ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Despite its admirable ambition, this book’s advice lacks specificity, empirical support, and originality.
A comprehensive view of fitness and health based on a new interpretation of human evolution.
The trend in recent years has been for fitness programs to become increasingly synoptic, expanding from a surgically specific correction of a particular problem to a full lifestyle. Authors Bob Zhang and Dongxun Zhang (Intended Evolution, 2015) take this development a step further by considering health as a function of a person’s entire evolutionary profile, or “healthspan.” First, they pithily articulate their view of “intended evolution”: humans, they say, can direct their evolutionary progress by changing the way they perceive their environments. As each person is essentially a mind-body composite, they assert, postulation of goals and awareness of purpose heavily influence one’s physiological progress. The rate of change in modern society has been so dizzyingly swift that it’s outpaced our adaptation to it, but this book says that one can direct future adaptation with a highly specialized health plan that considers one’s unique biological and aspirational circumstances. In other words, it posits that the state of one’s environment induces long-term changes, essentially saved as information in intelligently functioning internal systems. Unlike the standard interpretation of evolution, the authors believe that these changes can occur in the short term. They recommend a number of health and fitness exercises, but because each individual program must ultimately be customized, they can only suggest so much. The advice sometimes doesn’t inspire confidence—it’s easy to be dubious, for example, that the shaking and twisting exercises here will lead to considerable weight loss. Zhang and Zhang don’t provide any specific empirical or clinical support for their claims, either, and they’ve already more fully developed their theory of evolution in their previous work. Indeed, the whole book has the feel of an incomplete draft. Even in broad strokes, though, the notion of agency-laden evolution is an engaging one, and the authors are to be commended for transcending the faddish obsession with one-size-fits-all dietary regimens. However, despite the originality of the context they provide, the suggestion that success is partly a function of its anticipatory visualization is hardly new, and its advocacy doesn’t require a radical reconsideration of evolution.
Despite its admirable ambition, this book’s advice lacks specificity, empirical support, and originality.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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