A captivating read for nonexperts with a deep scientific curiosity.
A work of popular science centers on the act of seeing objects and scenes.
According to Levine, the understanding of sight as a straightforwardly mimetic representation of the external world is scientifically naïve. In fact, people constantly receive a deluge of “noisy, incomplete stimuli” that demands sorting and interpretation of the kind that finally paints a coherent, intelligible picture. Focusing on the identification of discrete objects and complex scenes, the author furnishes a rigorously researched account in which human perceptions are “influenced by assumptions beyond what is in the images themselves,” including overall context, attention, and expectation as well as even mood. This process requires more than merely the retina—newly understood as an “outpost of the brain”—but also the whole brain working collaboratively, including its “higher cognitive parts.” Ultimately, humans are trained to see not “distal” stimuli—the stuff that’s really out there independent of perception—but “proximal” stimuli, the “actual physical pattern available to neural receptors.” And so what we actually experience is an “elaborate internal representation of the world around us.” He asserts: “It is the ‘best’ solution our neural networks have settled upon. It is mainly visual, because we humans are generally visual animals, but it often includes sounds, odors, and physical sensations. We build this internal model when we look around us—it is the actual perception of which we are aware.” In this engaging book, Levine displays a talent for making the technically forbidding accessible. He also provides helpful images, some of which he photographed. (Others came from Getty.) But he spends too much time dwelling on secondary literature for a work not intended to be a “technical monograph or textbook,” making it unclear for whom it is intended. Still, he’s admirably free of dogmatism, readily admits when he can’t discover a “satisfying answer,” and, since the science is fluid, is quick to “concede that I am not about to divulge the eternal answers to the mysteries of sight.”
A captivating read for nonexperts with a deep scientific curiosity.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 160
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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