While casual readers may not be tempted to perform the experiments, the insights Costa provides into Darwin’s thinking and...
An instructive and entertaining look at Darwin’s “experimentising” and how it can be readily duplicated using mostly simple household tools.
Costa (Biology/Western Carolina Univ.; Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species, 2014, etc.), the executive director of the Highlands Biological Station, presents not just a how-to, but also a profile of Darwin in his time and place as he connected with other scientists and relied on them and on friends and family for assistance in his fieldwork. Darwin’s enormous curiosity about how nature works and how adaptations arise from natural selection led him to constantly examine his surroundings with a careful eye. Costa shows him investigating the anatomy of barnacles, honeycombs of bees, dispersion of seeds, reproduction techniques of orchids, behavior of carnivorous plants, twisting of vines, and earth-moving capacity of worms. Occasionally, Darwin called on other naturalists for help in gathering specimens, and he relied on the labor of his own children, who apparently were enthusiastic assistants. In each chapter, Costa describes a specific area of Darwin’s work and includes a materials list and a step-by-step procedure that demonstrates how to set up a related experiment, what to look for, and how to record one’s observations—in other words, how to think like a scientist. What makes this more than a textbook is the full portrait of Darwin that emerges. We see him as an inquisitive youngster; a beetle-collecting college student; a hardworking naturalist who endured seasickness and other obstacles during his years on the Beagle; a husband and family man, enduring the illnesses and deaths of three of his children; and always as a man consumed with curiosity about the natural world and finding many of the answers in his own backyard.
While casual readers may not be tempted to perform the experiments, the insights Costa provides into Darwin’s thinking and his revelations about the great man’s working life make this a worthwhile read. A perfect resource for biology teachers.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-23989-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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