A walk with an erudite and entertaining docent through the most marvelous of museums.
A magical mystery tour of seasons and starlight, rainbows and eclipses, circadian rhythms and jet lag, inner space and outer.
The text follows the morning-to-night cycle, whose ancient power Sims (Adam’s Navel, 2003, etc.) subsequently considers. He begins at dawn, noting the symbolic force of its arrival, and explains why the celestial colors can be so dramatic at that time. He assumes throughout that he has a scientifically naïve audience (do we really need to be told what a light-year is?), but he still deals with such sophisticated concepts as photons and quarks, cryptochrome and the libration of the moon. He also periodically refers to a poet, novelist, painter or dramatist whose words illuminate his point. Indeed, every page is chockablock with literary allusions, from Dickens and Dylan Thomas to The Phantom Tollbooth and Frankenstein. Sims makes effective use of the myth of Phaethon, the impulsive son of Apollo who stole the chariot of the sun, thereby earning a quick and fatal jolt from Zeus. He also distributes some tasty sprinkles of cultural history on his confection. Easter, for example, was scheduled near the full moon to accommodate late travel by pilgrims, and there are three types of twilight. Along the way, we get the history of cloud naming, the development of the telescope, stories about Darwin’s fascination with the movements of plants, shots at creationists and some hectoring about our stewardship of the planet. If the author slightly misquotes a line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, or mistakenly says Mary Godwin was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley when she wrote Frankenstein, or misses one of the most famous allusions to a sundial (the “prick of noon” line from Romeo and Juliet), we readily forgive. A soft berry or two cannot mar an otherwise fabulous shortcake.
A walk with an erudite and entertaining docent through the most marvelous of museums.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-06328-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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