A clear-eyed look at a fascinating man who left an unmistakable—if mixed—stamp upon the world we live in.
Biologist Brookes (Fly, 2001, etc.) pens a popular life of Darwin’s cousin, the inventor of eugenics.
The youngest child of a Quaker banker, and the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, Francis Galton (1822–1911) came from a family with strong claims to scientific eminence. At age four, he could read anything in English, knew the rudiments of Latin and French, and had made a solid start on mathematics. At his father’s urging he began medical studies before entering Cambridge to read mathematics. Independently wealthy after his father’s death, he mounted an expedition into southwest Africa, exploring hostile desert country without a single life lost. He returned home to honors from the Royal Geographic Society, wrote the bestselling Art of Travel, and married Louisa Butler, daughter of an eminent intellectual family. Now his long interest in mathematics and statistics re-emerged. He invented the weather map as we know it today and discovered the anti-cyclone weather pattern. Darwin’s Origin of Species convinced him that the human race might be improved in the same way as breeds of domestic animals, by encouraging only the best specimens to breed. The author shows how Galton’s idée fixe, despite initial resistance from his scientific peers, became by the end of his life a widely accepted scheme for the betterment of society. Galton’s own snobbism, along with the racism and chauvinism of his era, was undoubtedly a major ingredient in his advocacy of eugenics, which came to serve as justification for unspeakable evils. At the same time, Brookes points out, his focus on genetic determinism laid the ground for the modern science of genetics, which may eventually have a greater positive impact on the world than anything Galton claimed eugenics could achieve.
A clear-eyed look at a fascinating man who left an unmistakable—if mixed—stamp upon the world we live in.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-481-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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