The apologia for the previous super-controversial Worlds in Collision does away with all literary and mythological evidence and gets down to the bare bones and stones of the earth's history. The contention is boldly, inflexibly, the same; vast global catastrophes, the last of which surely flooded this world a mere few thousands of years before the current era, did the violent work which the Agassiz-Lyell-Darwin hypotheses sought to account for. If the ice Age is not an outright fraud, if uniform change is not the blissful dream of a peace-loving scientist, if evolution is not an outdated euphemism, these concepts are certainly at hopeless odds with the facts adduced by Velikovsky. He cites incredibly large graveyards where no enemy other than global flood could cause such havoc; sand deposits, monster boulders and resurrections of mountains which no known geological forces could have created; remains of an Andean city well developed culturally and of very recent date which was founded so high up that corn will not ripen there. The approach is essentially negative, punching every possible hole in the traditions of geology, paleontology, archaeology, biology, astronomy. The evidence is nevertheless torrential, embracing an immense variety of sources. The tone is often needlessly defiant and antagonistic. But for the science-minded, or even actively curious reader, it is a sensation-monger with a potential perhaps greater than the earlier book.
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1955
ISBN: 1906833125
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1955
Categories: BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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An eye-opening glimpse into the attempted self-unmaking of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable talents.
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The debut memoir from the pop and fashion star.
Early on, Simpson describes the book she didn’t write: “a motivational manual telling you how to live your best life.” Though having committed to the lucrative deal years before, she “walked away,” fearing any sort of self-help advice she might give would be hypocritical. Outwardly, Simpson was at the peak of her success, with her fashion line generating “one billion dollars in annual sales.” However, anxiety was getting the better of her, and she admits she’d become a “feelings addict,” just needing “enough noise to distract me from the pain I’d been avoiding since childhood. The demons of traumatic abuse that refused to let me sleep at night—Tylenol PM at age twelve, red wine and Ambien as a grown, scared woman. Those same demons who perched on my shoulder, and when they saw a man as dark as them, leaned in to my ear to whisper, ‘Just give him your light. See if it saves him…’ ” On Halloween 2017, Simpson hit rock bottom, and, with the intervention of her devoted friends and husband, began to address her addictions and underlying fears. In this readable but overlong narrative, the author traces her childhood as a Baptist preacher’s daughter moving 18 times before she “hit fifth grade,” and follows her remarkable rise to fame as a singer. She reveals the psychological trauma resulting from years of sexual abuse by a family friend, experiences that drew her repeatedly into bad relationships with men, most publicly with ex-husband Nick Lachey. Admitting that she was attracted to the validating power of an audience, Simpson analyzes how her failings and triumphs have enabled her to take control of her life, even as she was hounded by the press and various music and movie executives about her weight. Simpson’s memoir contains plenty of personal and professional moments for fans to savor. One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
An eye-opening glimpse into the attempted self-unmaking of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable talents.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289996-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
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PERSPECTIVES
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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