Opens interesting doors and may inspire alternative ways of searching for truth, though the answers here leave something to...
Verschuur (The Invisible Universe: The Story of Radio Astronomy, 2015, etc.) discusses his experimental search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
As a professional radio astronomer, Verschuur began seeking signs of extraterrestrial intelligence by listening to the sky, hoping to hear an alien noise among the dissonance. Though the scientific jargon here may be a bit difficult for lay readers, Verschuur quickly moves on after concluding that this was like “looking for an alien needle in the cosmic haystack.” Discouraged by the odds of making meaningful contact through astronomy and disenchanted with the closed-minded, politically motivated limitations of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence group, he embarked on an unconventional journey. An admirer of 1960s dolphin communicator John Lilly, Verschuur posits that truth-seeking requires a suspension of one’s own disbeliefs as well as experiential experimentation. He concedes, however, that “in practice this is very difficult because we become so bound up in what we believe to be true that it is usually impossible to see another point of view.” Nonetheless, he proceeded in his search for truth, going from sensory deprivation tank sessions to meetings with a spiritual communicator to studying Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. Verschuur suggests that perhaps extraterrestrial communication may be achieved through internal searches and forms of telepathy. Strictly objectively scientific–minded readers may find some of his illuminations difficult to process. Yet Verschuur is ever cognizant that, while his methods give him more freedom, they also put him inside the experiment and thus prevent him from looking at it objectively—bias he concedes. He nevertheless builds surprising bridges between seemingly disparate ideas, offering, for instance, that SETI scientists, dolphin researchers, and Christians are all using different methods but looking for the same thing—something beyond themselves/Earth/reality, i.e., truth, which they all agree is still out there. Results of his experiments are largely inconclusive but raise questions about human nature and the possible implications of extraterrestrial life.
Opens interesting doors and may inspire alternative ways of searching for truth, though the answers here leave something to be desired.Pub Date: April 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1508646983
Page Count: 396
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
