A well-documented and frightening assessment of America’s fraught relationship with science.
Soplop surveys the dangers of scientific illiteracy and disinformation in this nonfiction book.
In 2020, the United States experienced both the Covid-19 pandemic and record-setting wildfires on the West Coast that destroyed over four million acres. The nation’s “fumbled” responses to both crises, per the author, stem from a “complicated relationship” with scientific information that “has prevented us from digesting and adequately confronting many of the greatest problems of our time.” There is plenty of blame to go around, Soplop asserts, including the rise of social media and “fake news,” which have been effectively exploited by politicians like Donald Trump, and the embrace of postmodernism by academic liberals in the 1970s and 1980s, which deemphasized “objective truth” in favor of “subjectivity.” Divided into four parts, the book begins with a history of science that transitions into conversations about the nature of evidence (emphasizing that not all evidence is “equal”) and how scientists reach a consensus. Parts two and three explore how rampant anti-scientific thought continues to persist into the 21st century. The topics discussed here include not only hot-button, politicized issues like masks, vaccines, and climate change, but also the popularity of “pseudoscience” in the burgeoning wellness industry, whose bevy of products, from essential oils to supplements, fails to stand up to basic scientific inquiry. While much of the book offers a grim portrait of the current state of education and information literacy, it ends with an optimistic appraisal of the promise that scientific methodology offers to solving the major problems of our era and combatting disinformation. To this end, the book’s appendix features a handbook for “Becoming a More Discerning and Less Vulnerable Consumer of Science News and Information.” As a science writer with a graduate degree in medical journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Soplop balances her convincing research (which is backed by over 900 endnotes) with an accessible writing style geared toward readers unfamiliar with scientific scholarship.
A well-documented and frightening assessment of America’s fraught relationship with science.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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