An engrossing and though-provoking blend of religion, philosophy, science, and a quest for the healing properties of human...
A writer offers a philosophical inquiry into humanity’s “old wounds”—and how to overcome them.
McGrath’s slim, decidedly unconventional nonfiction debut seeks to fuse Christian theology, Eastern medicinal philosophy, and some concepts gleaned from the worlds of paleobiology and sociology. The author's quest to delve into the deeper meaning of reality began decades ago on a small farm in Vermont when she suddenly saw an old tree stump as “vibrating energy.” This led to a lifetime of studying both science and spirituality, and in these pages it leads McGrath to speculate on the ultimate origins of humanity’s deep “wound” of being constantly at war with itself in what she refers to as “our frenetic dance with the annihilation of life as we know it on this planet.” The author looks at what she considers the two driving instincts of life on Earth, dominance and nurture. She attempts to map them during the crucial shift primordial humans underwent from hunters to herders, a transformation she considers a warping event for the psyche of the entire species. These speculations are accompanied by some of the book’s most captivating thinking, exploring the prehistoric forces that shaped the development of modern humans. Perspective changed, for example: “Four million years ago, some primates shifted their center of gravity and stood erect….What had been underneath was now in front.” In addition, extensive grooming rituals “demanded an attuned sphere of awareness,” she writes, teaching human ancestors’ hands “to connect with the other in love as acceptance, affection, forgiveness, comfort, and healing.” The enthralling nature of these insights is only slightly marred by some of McGrath’s more controversial claims, whether about the nature of physical reality (“Energy and matter, we now know, are interchangeable”) or her own supposed ability to heal injuries on a cellular level. But in the main, the wide-ranging book’s eloquent intertwining of science and spirituality (“Trees are magnificent manifestations of life dancing with gravity, demonstrating height, balance, symmetry, and strength”) is consistently intriguing.
An engrossing and though-provoking blend of religion, philosophy, science, and a quest for the healing properties of human nature.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982220-65-5
Page Count: 114
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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