Makes many good points and portrays a writer of intellect and compassion, but the arguments struggle to coalesce into a...
An intelligent and impassioned, albeit not quite cohesive, argument for uncertainty and a foundation in the arts.
Formally trained as a mathematician and psychologist, Loase spends a good portion of this slim volume laying the groundwork for his thesis that mathematics relies on a foundation constructed on assumptions. Along the way, he references certain principles of statistics and calculus as well as more esoteric branches of mathematics. He also touches on the work of several famous mathematicians, ranging from Bertrand Russell to Andrew Wiles, making his points without belaboring his ideas or getting bogged down in minutiae. However, once the mathematical chapters are finished, Loase’s arguments quickly begin to lose momentum. A chapter on science, for instance, veers off topic into what reads like an attack on atheists, specifically Richard Dawkins, whose name is consistently misspelled: “Richard Dawkings has made it fashionable to deify science at the expense of religion.” The following chapter on free will muddies the waters further, since the concept appears more as a statement of Loase’s faith than a reasoned argument. By the arrival of chapters extolling the importance of literature, film, art, and psychology, the overall thread of Loase’s thesis has been lost in the ether, with individual statements and assertions making sense but failing to coalesce into a logical whole. Furthermore, while Loase’s work on the concept of “sigfluence”—positive, significant, long-term interpersonal influence—is undoubtedly valuable in psychological and behavioral studies, its value to the idea of liberal arts being a useful guide to one’s life development is not made sufficiently clear; as such, the frequent references to it seem more like self-promotion than an attempt to contextualize and/or bolster his arguments. Fans of science, mathematics, the liberal arts, and the value of a well-rounded education may find themselves echoing Daniel Dennett: “There’s nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear.”
Makes many good points and portrays a writer of intellect and compassion, but the arguments struggle to coalesce into a meaningful statement, likely leaving many readers underwhelmed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62006-485-6
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Sunbury Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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