More well-told tales from the files of neurologist Klawans (Life, Death, and in Between, 1992, etc.), this time illustrating his views on the brain’s evolution. What distinguishes our species, Klawans notes, is the continued development of the human brain after birth. Accounts of his brain-damaged patients reveal characteristics of this unique organ, its early plasticity, and its susceptibility to environmental influences. The brain’s window of opportunity for acquiring language is revealed in one story of a five-year-old child treated for seizures that would have left her unable to speak if they had continued until she was twelve. Klawans uses the case of a patient suffering from carbon-monoxide poisoning to demonstrate how the biology of an illiterate person’s brain differs from that of a person who has learned symbolic communication, and the example of Maestro Rota, whose stroke has left him almost without speech but still able to conduct an orchestra, to raise the question of how and when the brain acquires musical abilities. Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Kreutzfeldt-Jakob, and mad-cow disease—all provide Klawans with material for exploring the human brain and asking how the environment human beings have shaped plays a crucial role in its postnatal development. As his title suggests, Klawans wants to credit not our early ancestor man the hunter for the expansion and dominance of the human species, but rather woman the nurturer, who taught her dependent young, with developing brains, what they needed to know for survival, a task that depended on symbolic language and led in time to the evolution of brains selected for the acquisition of language. Readers of Oliver Sacks, who turns up in one of Klawans’s stories, will find much to savor here, as will fans of Berton Rouche’s tales of medical detection. Like them, Klawans is crisp and clear in his descriptions and knows how to hold the general reader’s interest while imparting scientific information. Engrossing stuff.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-393-04831-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
There's an elegant, albeit humbling, logic to the first three books in the Science Masters Series, all coming in October. In the middle is Leakey (Origins Reconsidered, 1992, etc.) writing about, well, us. Then, lest we acquire an inflated notion of our own importance, there are the ultimate bookends of the beginning and the end of the universe: The Origin of the Universe, by John D. Barrow (Astronomy/Univ. of Sussex, England; PI in the Sky, 1992, etc.) and The Last Three Minutes, by Paul Davies (Natural Philosophy/Univ. of Adelaide, Australia; The Mind of God, 1991, etc.). The series is being published by an international consortium of 16 publishers. It's a serious, much-needed effort to bring practicing scientists in touch with the general public. Other heavyweight brainiacs lined up for the series include philosopher and cog-sci guy Daniel C. Dennett; paleontologist (and DiMaggiologist) Stephen Jay Gould; anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson; and artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky. This is good publishing. PBS, eat your heart out.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-03135-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
IN THE NEWS
In the prehistoric days before Jurassic Park and Barney, the focus of dinosaur-mania for anyone growing up in New York City was the American Museum of Natural History, where the looming skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex inspired awe in generations of children. Now, with the renovation and extension of its dinosaur exhibit, that venerable and much-loved institution offers a history of its paleontology department, from its creation in 1891 to the present day. Among the adventures Wallace (The Audubon Society Pocket Guide to Dinosaurs, not reviewed) recounts are those of Barnum Brown (known as ``Mr. Bones''), who discovered the museum's T. rex in Hell Creek, Mont., in 1907; Roy Chapman Andrews, whose dinosaur- hunting fields in 1922 were in the Gobi Desert, where he unearthed the giant rhinoceros Paraceratherium; to Malcolm McKenna, who returned to the Gobi in the 1990s and found the remains of the Velociraptor. No amount of cinematic magic can surpass the wonder induced by a personal encounter with the remains of these giants who once stalked the earth.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-86590-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
© Copyright 2025 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.
