Affording glimpses into both scientific detection processes and vicious academic infighting, this will appeal to scientists...
Engrossing account of recent developments in a long-running and contentious scientific debate.
With the exception of the creationism vs. evolution controversy, few areas of contemporary science have engendered such fierce dogmatism and even fiercer adherents as the questions of who the first Americans were and when they got here. Assisted by science writer and editor Page (The Lethal Partner, 1996, etc.), Adovasio presents his case with reasonableness and clarity. He begins with his early fieldwork at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter near Pittsburgh, where in 1974 he found charcoal from two hearths that placed humans in the vicinity nearly 4,000 years before they supposedly have set foot anywhere on the continent. Though he vowed not to, the author became ensnared in what anthropologist Tom D. Dillehay has called the “dishonesty, double standards, and phony scientific posture” of scholars with an axe to grind or a reputation to uphold at all costs. At issue was the sacrosanct notion that nomadic mammoth hunters crossed the frozen Bering Strait during the last glacial period about 12,000 years ago. Now director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute, Adovasio contends humans arrived millennia earlier, most likely by boat, and that the contributions of women were more critical to their success than previously credited. Despite the existence of such widely accepted methods as radiocarbon dating, much evidence about the time of human habitation in the Americas has been automatically discounted by opponents of whatever theory the dating supports. Add to this the fact that various ethnic groups, including modern Native Americans, have a vested interest in the first Americans being their ancestors, whether a lost band of Israelites or survivors of a sunken Atlantis or wandering Welshmen in sealskin coracles, and you have all the ingredients for an intellectual brouhaha that frequently reached the vitriolic flashpoint.
Affording glimpses into both scientific detection processes and vicious academic infighting, this will appeal to scientists and general readers alike.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50552-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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