A sometimes-difficult though rewarding journey through the possibilities and impossibilities of forecasting the future.
Nahum, a physician, offers his first book, an ambitious tome that exhaustively explores the human capacity to make predictions.
As vice president and head of global clinical development for primary care and women’s health care at Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals in Berkeley, California, Stanford-educated Nahum researched models to predict birth weight. This scientific curiosity about our ability to forecast and Nahum’s deep and broad-reaching intellectual interests inform this book that draws from phenomenology, speculative theology, information theory, physics, cosmology, and other areas in an attempt to synthesize a complete theory of knowledge focused on the question: can we predict the future? This dense volume deals in minute detail, but it’s not a book for people who want to outplay the stock market or win at the racetrack. “…despite our best efforts, everything doesn’t always go according to plan,” Nahum says. “The question is why?” His exploration more often focuses not on the capacity to predict the future, but on the constraints, the knowledge holes, and gaps that frustrate attempts to accurately predict what the future holds. The book explores some fairly arcane and intellectually rich turf in excruciating detail. Yet Nahum doesn’t seem too invested in making the material as fascinating as possible. In fact, much of the writing is more focused on textbook explanation than on trying to provide access points that might make his argument more compelling to those unfamiliar with the diverse perspectives and disciplines that inform his exploration. There’s also not much in the way of citations, and a dearth of quotes makes the going somewhat ponderous. Still, Nahum reveals a mind of incredible reach as well as a great capacity for exceptionally detailed thinking about an intriguing problem.
A sometimes-difficult though rewarding journey through the possibilities and impossibilities of forecasting the future.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1480811065
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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