Humanity and its environments are even more interconnected than we knew.
A densely detailed account of a promising new science.
The establishment of a new field of scientific inquiry is a noteworthy occurrence, especially when it holds the potential to benefit the entire human population. Such is Berman’s ongoing achievement in “environmental neuroscience,” a drive to understand the relationship between individuals and the environmental factors that influence them, specifically the natural and urban worlds. Berman, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and an engineer, demonstrates the ways in which our physical environment has a profound impact on our behavior and our brain development. “In study after study, we find that even secondhand or simulated contact with nature helps our cognitive, physical, and social health,” Berman writes. But immersion is best, whether in city parks or the wilderness. On the surface, this overarching theme seems like something John Muir could have set forth in a paragraph. But the subject is a great deal more complex, the issues urgent, and the proposed solutions requiring global engagement. Berman’s is a singularly significant book that is both fascinating and taxing. Although leavened with personal anecdotes, it reads at times like an unending stream of scientific studies related in numbing detail, intentionally but needlessly repetitive, and too often constructed with paragraphs so long it makes you wish you were in nature, escaping the page. If intended primarily for a professional audience, all well and good. It’s brilliant and persuasive. If aimed at the intelligent general reader, it is something less than an unqualified success—which is not to say that it lacks clarity or an unshakable logic. Berman also projects what the future may hold in the field, while discussing how its discoveries can help us design better environments today.
Humanity and its environments are even more interconnected than we knew.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781668058770
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon Element
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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