A learned and absorbing book, especially in its account of the reverberations of the Scopes trial in recent American history.
A recapitulation of the celebrated 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tenn.—but one that goes far beyond the courtroom in its analysis.
We can't be blamed if we think of the Scopes trial solely as a battle of two titans, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, representing a collision of new thought and old faith that was bound to happen somewhere. That reason-vs.-superstition scenario comes to us thanks to books like Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's play Inherit the Wind, which present the trial with what lawyer and historian Larson (Trial and Error, 1985) calls "cartoonlike simplicity." It was much more than that, he shows, illustrating his history of the trial with editorials and reports from contemporary newspapers that had a far clearer view of the stakes. The Chicago Tribune rightly opined that the trial was truly about making the beliefs of fundamentalist Christians mandatory in the classroom, thus violating the separation of church and state. Darwinian concepts had been introduced into schools long before, writes Larson, but the explosion of the secondary-school population after a postWW I baby boom gave those ideas currency among a large number of students (50,000 in Tennessee at the time of the trial, a state that had only 10,000 high schoolers 15 years earlier). Larson neatly examines other issues that bore on the Scopes case: academic freedom, the right of states and local bodies to control the content of education, the growth of evolutionary theory in the wake of hominid fossil discoveries of the period. He also probes the mythmaking tendencies of the American media, which created what biologist Stephen Jay Gould calls a "realm of nostalgic Americana" evoked in the course of more recent creationist controversies.
A learned and absorbing book, especially in its account of the reverberations of the Scopes trial in recent American history.Pub Date: July 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-07509-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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