Politically to your taste or not, the work is a salubrious tonic to the blinkered toxicity of the unlimited-progress mindset.
Surgical pathologist Heffner argues that the notion of unlimited progress creates a perilous optimism in both the scientific and socio-political realms.
Humans' faith in "progress" has become delusional, writes Heffner in this dense but well-guided foray into the roots and foibles of our giddy optimism that all technological and social quandaries have answers. In part, the roots of this optimism can be found in the period following the Industrial Revolution up until about the middle of the 20th century. It was then that technological/scientific progress was so spectacular that its great leaps forward infected society with a sense of unending betterment, or at least impending solutions. Science was ascendant, its objectivity and logical positivism applicable even in the social sphere: home economics, the science of administration, political science. Such headiness is a chimera, cautions Heffner; science has its limits, and it isn’t as tidy, logical or formally objective as many claim. This is especially true in the arenas that saw terrific advancement, such as medicine and transportation. Heffner provides numerous examples of a pervasive attitude that assumes that problems can be approached from a predictable, digital aspect, whereas many are more analog—continuous and unpredictable—in manner, from chemical signals leaping the synaptic cleft, to the biochemical processes of DNA and cellular instability, to weather forecasting and nuclear fusion. Heffner claims “trying to control or cure…cancer by tinkering with DNA can be seen as similar to trying to control the contour of fallen snow by altering some of the details of snowflakes.” Chaos theory seems more pertinent, tiny input parameter uncertainties resulting in unpredictable, sometimes huge, effects. Having entered into a period of diminishing research returns, incremental changes are in order. Heffner sees this as applying to the socio-political terrain as well. Here readers can joust with his conservatism—“Since the risk of calamity to the train may be increasing, the brakemen are becoming more indispensable”—and his own heady optimism that worthwhile change will receive “due bipartisan support,” vested interests be damned.
Politically to your taste or not, the work is a salubrious tonic to the blinkered toxicity of the unlimited-progress mindset.Pub Date: July 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450237864
Page Count: 136
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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