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 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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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