A humane, appropriately qualified argument that provides aid and comfort for believers—and that should also interest...
An anthropologist mounts a defense of the religious impulse as biological and cultural imperative.
Think of Konner (Anthropology and Neuroscience/Emory Univ.; Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, 2015, etc.) as an anti–Richard Dawkins. Though, as he notes, “the most religious countries are the least developed ones” and the level of religious belief is declining rapidly among millennials in both Europe and the U.S., there’s something to religion. But what is it? Ranging broadly among traditions and talking with believers, the author identifies a few of its characteristics. One rabbi tells him, for instance, that it packs a healthy sense of awe, an ego-tempering sense that we are not the be-all and end-all of the universe, while Konner himself holds that a central factor of religion is its power to forge community and companionship. As a scientist, the author fully acknowledges that religion eludes scientific study and addresses questions that science perhaps cannot. The fact that so many of our kind have a religious impulse to begin with suggests, as an Indian neurologist memorably writes, that “when God made us, he put an antenna into our brains so we could find him, and it just happens to be in the temporal lobe.” But there’s more to religion, as Konner gamely admits, as an instrument of social control, of instilling norms of social behavior that open with the tenet, “People behave when they think they are watched." Of course, people don’t always behave—it sometimes seems that the more overtly religious a person is the more heinous their transgressions. Konner doesn’t venture much in the way of the definitive, but he urges coexistence and even partnership, noting that the days of religion’s attempting to stamp out science are coming to an end, the behavior of fundamentalist politicians notwithstanding. “Science and faith,” he writes, “are candles in a darkness that is vast compared to the light that either sheds.”
A humane, appropriately qualified argument that provides aid and comfort for believers—and that should also interest fair-minded nonbelievers.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-65186-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Daniels emerges as a force to be reckoned with—and not someone to cross. Of interest to politics junkies but with plenty of...
A lively, candid memoir from person-in-the-news Daniels.
The author is a household name for just one reason, as she allows—adding, though, that “my life is a lot more interesting than an encounter with Donald Trump.” So it is, and not without considerable effort on her part. Daniels—not her real name, but one, she points out, that she owns, unlike the majority of porn stars—grew up on the wrong side of town, the product of a broken home with few prospects, but she is just as clearly a person of real intelligence and considerable business know-how. Those attributes were not the reason that Trump called her on a fateful night more than a decade ago, but she put them to work, so much so that in some preliminary conversation, he proclaimed—by her account, his talk is blustery and insistent—that “our businesses are kind of a lot alike, but different.” The talk led to what “may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.” The details are deeply unpleasant, but Daniels adds nuance to the record: She doesn’t find it creepy that Trump likened her to his daughter, and she reckons that as a reality show host, he had a few points in his favor even if he failed to deliver on a promise to get her on The Apprentice. The author’s 15 minutes arrived a dozen years later, when she was exposed as the recipient of campaign hush money. Her account of succeeding events is fast-paced and full of sharp asides pointing to the general sleaziness of most of the players and the ugliness of politics, especially the Trumpian kind, which makes the porn industry look squeaky-clean by comparison.
Daniels emerges as a force to be reckoned with—and not someone to cross. Of interest to politics junkies but with plenty of lessons on taking charge of one’s own life.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-20556-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2018
Gioia, musician and critic, winner of the ASCAPDeems Taylor Award for The Imperfect Art (not reviewed) takes on a daunting task, tracing the history of jazz from preCivil War New Orleans to the embattled music of today—and does a creditable job of it. Jazz's history has been written by entirely too many mythographers and polemicists. Gioia, mercifully, spares us the myths and polemics. ``The Africanization of American music,'' as he calls it, begins farther back in American history than New Orleans's aptly named Storyville red-light district around the turn of the century; he starts his narrative in the slave market of the city's Congo Square in 1819, and when it comes to Storyville, he offers hard facts to puncture the picturesque racism that finds jazz's roots in the whorehouses of New Orleans. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Gioia's account is the sociohistorical insights it offers, albeit occasionally as throwaway sidelights, such as his observation about drumming as an avatar of regimentation more than of freedom. He is particularly good in explaining how the music was disseminated and shaped by new technologies—the player piano, the phonograph, radio. He is also excellent at drawing a portrait of a musician's style in short brushstrokes. His prose is for the most part fluid and even graceful (although his metaphors do get a bit strained at times, as in his comparison of Don Redman's ``jagged, pointillistic'' arrangement of ``The Whiteman Stomp'' and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). Although Gioia is much too generous to jazz-rock fusion of the '70s and '80s and probably gives more space than necessary to white dance bands like the Casa Loma orchestra, if you wanted to introduce someone to jazz with a single book, this would be a good choice. (9 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-509081-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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