A thoughtful, rigorous history and celebration of the development of rationality.
A concise history of our extraordinary arc from mere survival to scientific understanding.
Husher assumes a breathtakingly ambitious task—to explain the emergence of life and the subsequent attempt to comprehend it in under 300 pages—all delivered in prose accessible to the “average layman.” His focus is humans’ steep “learning curve,” the “long and torturous journey forward from this crude and ignorant beginning” to the rational explication of the “secrets of life.” The story begins at the beginning—the genesis of Earth—and chronicles the improbable conditions necessary, chiefly the availability of free oxygen, for life, and in particular human life, to emerge. The collective maturation from original oblivion to scientific knowledge came through a series of “transformation battles”—self-inflicted catastrophes, like war, and natural ones, like disease, compelled us to think and invent. The results were three great innovations that catalyzed the progress of the human race: the alphabet, the printing press, and the advent of the microscope, the last of which introduced scientists to the world of the materially real but generally unseen. Humankind’s rational triumphs, as the author sees it, are the products of vices overcome and a penchant for self-revision. “One of man’s main strengths came from his failings—learning from when he did something that didn’t perform as he expected and making sure he noted this and took another direction the next time it came up.” Husher’s book simply tries to cover too much ground—any monograph, especially a relatively brief one, that covers both Aristotle and the black plague will have to suffer from its abridgments. However, he succeeds in poignantly capturing not only technical advancements, but also the “wonder” and “miracle” of it all. Further, he furnishes a splendidly lucid account of complex topics like DNA.
A thoughtful, rigorous history and celebration of the development of rationality.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-955944-42-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Litprime Solutions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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 2026 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.
