Though the prose is often florid, Pierson convincingly demonstrates that when it comes to relating to man’s best friend, one...
Pierson (The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing: Long-Distance Motorcycling's Endless Road, 2011, etc.) delivers a fascinating if sprawling exposition on the history and science of animal behavior.
Beginning with a close examination of methods she had to learn—and unlearn—when training her own dogs, the author probes the history of how humans have attempted to relate more closely to animals with whom they feel an affinity but find a daunting challenge when attempting to domesticate (“it is rarely a good idea to own a dog much smarter than you are”). How to bridge that communicative chasm is the main thrust of the book, which is rooted in the findings of behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner. Skinner’s animal experiments from the mid-1930s, though pointed at illuminating the human condition, revealed the absolute power of reward. “There is no more powerful motive to learning, or survival, than fulfillment of essential needs,” writes the author, and animal trainers coming from Skinner’s camp have since believed positive reinforcement is key to need fulfillment achieved through operant conditioning, or “the manner in which learned behavior is acquired.” Pierson’s account is provocative since this line of thinking bucks the traditional behaviorist school of thought found in dog training in particular, which relies on a “classic conception of teaching as inseparable from threat and compulsion.” Punishment and deprivation of essential needs, as practiced by “Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan and a number of zoos, Pierson shows, fly in the face of copious scientific evidence showing that animals learn most effectively through positive reinforcement. The author goes on to extrapolate this finding into broader realms of human commerce, such as politics, with varying degrees of success, creating at times a rambling discourse.
Though the prose is often florid, Pierson convincingly demonstrates that when it comes to relating to man’s best friend, one doesn’t have to be cruel to be kind.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-06619-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
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