The New World may well be another Old World, and hoary parables may speak as loudly as DNA testing in the search to answer...
Where did North Americans come from way back when, asks Canadian journalist Dewar (Cloak of Green, not reviewed, etc.), in this eye-opening study for laypeople that debates the merits of archaeological theories swirling about the question.
Archaeological orthodoxy has it that the ancestors of Native Americans entered the continent over the Bering Land Bridge at the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago. But, as Dewar illustrates in this smoothly written overview of the conflicting evidence, there is plenty of material that suggests otherwise. There are the Caucasoid features of 8000+-year-old Kennewick Man; the mitochondrial DNA work that found examples of North American populations without a common ancestor in Asia; hookworm evidence in early South Americans that could not have survived a Beringian crossing; and ancient bones with African features, plus lots more niggling little questions that simply have no truck with the established picture. Dewar travels to all the locales, interviews all the principals, comes at the problem from many angles: remains, ancient art, oral traditions, forensic archaeology, international law, racism. This is all fascinating stuff, and Dewar writes it up with the flair of a good mystery—yet what rankles and haunts the reader long after the all the new theories have been posited are Dewar's condemnations of the field of archaeological study: all the petty squabbles and beard-pulling; the narrow-minded, fractious, timid, possessive scientists who don't even publish their findings; of government interference and the deference to vested interests; of the withheld reports and outright theft of evidence and private digs and scattered materials that amount to a scandal; and of the miserable politics—land, political, and academic—that taints everything it touches.
The New World may well be another Old World, and hoary parables may speak as loudly as DNA testing in the search to answer Dewar's question.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0979-0
Page Count: 640
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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