An entertaining tour through the world of flying saucers, aliens, and weird science.
A history of the decadeslong government involvement in reports of lights in the sky, odd flying shapes, and peculiar radar images.
Veteran journalist Graff, author of Watergate, The Only Plane in the Sky, and Raven Rock, tracks the popular obsession with UFOs, but his real interest is the way that various agencies of the U.S. government, mainly connected to the Air Force, have responded to sightings and other pieces of evidence. He readily admits that many UFO claims can be debunked, but notes that the Air Force seems to have taken a lot of them seriously. Graff recounts reports of officers turning up to interview people who said they had seen a UFO, often with a view to persuading them that they were mistaken. They were usually unsuccessful, and their attempts often backfired, feeding a growing network of conspiracy theories. Graff keeps his tongue in his cheek when discussing the range of books and articles claiming that the truth was out there but hidden away, and he notes that connecting disparate dots doesn’t necessarily add up to hard evidence. However, America in the 1970s, after Watergate and Vietnam, was fertile ground for conspiracy theories. There were even rumors that the government not only knew about UFOs, but also had alien ships in storage. Meanwhile, some respected scientists were taking the possibility of extraterrestrial life seriously, looking for radio signals and sending their own into space. Some exploratory spacecraft carried messages of friendship. Graff admires the open-mindedness and imagination of these researchers, although he concludes that their work has yet to produce substantial returns. He avoids taking a firm stand on the existence of UFOs but acknowledges that it is a big universe and there are plenty of inexplicable phenomena.
An entertaining tour through the world of flying saucers, aliens, and weird science.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781982196776
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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