An eye-opening description of scientific transhumanism that may provoke older readers to curse themselves for being born a...
A fascinating examination of technology that “will radically transform human health and extend our life spans far beyond what most of us have ever dreamed.”
Doctors routinely replace failing joints; machines do the work of the heart, lungs, and kidneys; genetic engineering cures some rare diseases. These are only the beginning, enthusiasts proclaim. Future advances will transform our bodies and extend our lives—and, they add, this is a good thing. This transformation is inevitable, but there are cons as well as pros, emphasizes former American Psychiatric Association director Herold (Stem Cell Wars: Inside Stories from the Frontlines, 2006) in this often dazzling account of life-extension progress that pays equal attention to its significance. About 1,200 people are living with a Total Artificial Heart in place of their own. It requires a 13-pound driver that the patient carries in a backpack connected to two tubes coming out of the abdomen. The longest a recipient has lived with the heart is nearly four years. Implantable lungs and kidneys function in animals, and human tests are in the works. An artificial pancreas (for diabetics) may be on the market in a few years. Gene therapy and pharmacology are moving beyond curing disease into enhancing health and extending life. Nanotechnology and mind-cloning, still laboratory curiosities, will do the same on a massive scale. Herold reminds readers that life expectancy has already doubled since 1850. As longevity depends increasingly on technical changes in the human body, it has produced a fierce debate between advocates of “transhumanism” and opponents who warn that it is an irresistible crutch that will degrade human nature. The author gives both sides equal time but is willing to let matters proceed.
An eye-opening description of scientific transhumanism that may provoke older readers to curse themselves for being born a few decades too early.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-312-37521-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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