This look at heterodox approaches to postmodern technology veers all over the map, leaving little room for informed comments on pertinent subtopics. Logically enough, Davis begins by looking at the impact of both the phonetic alphabet’specifically, its relationship to Christianity—and of the discovery of electricity on modern technology. His definition of “gnostic”in these early chapters seems innovative: Davis is careful to distinguish between the word’s relation to the form of Christianity revealed in the documents found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in the late 1940s, and its more general meaning as that which lies outside the mainstream. Yet, at the same time, he emphasizes that a strong link connects both definitions. Davis characterizes their shades-of-gray division as like that between the “soul”and the “spirit.” Along the way, the author also considers important figures on the fringes of mainstream Christianity, notably Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and their bearing on emerging technologies. Unwisely, he spends a great deal of time discussing movements that are far beyond the pale, such as the Church of Scientology and the suicidal Heaven’s Gate cult. In addition, Davis touches on the ties that bind J.R.R. Tolkien to high-powered computer games such as Doom; on the Year 2000 computer issue; on Masonic conspiracy theories; and much more. As all of this leaves him with little extra space, he (ironically) doesn—t engage enough with postmodern technology itself. In the concluding chapter, which provides an intriguing yet unmapped connection between an ancient Buddhist myth of Indra’s net and today’s World Wide Web before lapsing into a preachy epilogue, Davis writes, “Tough-minded readers may find this interdependent vision of mystic materialism a bit of a stretch .‘’ Unfortunately for him, the same is also true of most of his work. He would have done well to have taken any chapter of Techgnosis and developed a book from it. Instead, here’s a challenging mishmash.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1998
ISBN: 0-517-70415-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
McPhee (Irons in the Fire, 1997, etc.) winds up his artful geohistory of the US by going deep into the heartland—Kansas, Nebraska—in pursuit of deep time: the Precambrian. Included in this collection are his four previous forays into geology—Basin and Range (1981, which, to encapsulate, delineated plate tectonics), In Suspect Terrain (1983, Appalachian geohistory and some broadsides at plate tectonic theory), Rising from the Plains (1986, Wyoming curiosities and environmental conundrums), and Assembling California (1993, a showcase for active tectonics). Here he adds "Crossing the Craton"—craton being the rock basement of the continent—delving into the realms of "isotopic and chemical signatures, cosmological data, and conjecture," in the company of geochronologist Randy Van Schmus. McPhee has a way of making deep structures seem freestanding, right there to ogle: "the walls of the rift are three thousand feet sheer," they're also 600 feet below the surface. Dexterous as ever, McPhee takes on the creation—early island arcs and vulcanism and microcontinents—and tells it with all the power and simplicity a genesis story deserves.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-10520-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
Sharp narratives that illuminate and challenge the status quo of women's roles in the world. Slim in scope, but yet another...
Acclaimed author and Harper’s contributing editor Solnit (The Faraway Nearby, 2013, etc.) expounds on the way women are perceived in American culture and around the world.
Despite years of feminism and such activist groups as Women Strike for Peace, much of the female population in the world is often powerless, forced to remain voiceless and subjugated to acts of extreme violence in the home, on school campuses and anywhere men deem they should dominate. "Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they attempt to control some women,” she writes, “and fear of that violence limits most women in ways they've gotten so used to they hardly notice—and we hardly address." The few women who do stand up and shout to the world are the exception, not the rule, and Solnit provides a platform and a voice for them and the thousands who are too overwhelmed by fear and guilt to speak up. Solnit's thought-provoking essays illuminate the discrepancies in modern society, a society in which female students are told to stay indoors after dark due to the fact that one man is a rapist, as opposed to an alternate world in which male students are told not to attack females in the first place. Same-sex marriage, Virginia Woolf, the patrilineal offspring of the Bible and los desaparecidos of Argentina are artfully woven into the author’s underlying message that women have come a long way on the road to equality but have further to go.
Sharp narratives that illuminate and challenge the status quo of women's roles in the world. Slim in scope, but yet another good book by Solnit.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60846-386-2
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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