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
Dense and striking, to be savored and reread.
A compact return to the personal by one of today’s sharpest literary minds.
Following two recent works of cultural criticism, Nelson’s new text swings and sings back to the intimate and personal. Her quest to alleviate persistent, consuming orofacial pain serves as a narrative backbone assembled from a series of treatment plans, including Botox, a tongue-tie frenectomy, and even the suggestion to tape her mouth shut while sleeping. As she collects recommendations for pain management that veer from the surgical to the “woo-woo”—each promising accurate diagnosis and permanent deliverance—Nelson drifts between the tangible sensation of her pain and the surreality of her dreams. Her search for relief swells around the puncture wound of the coronavirus, and her prose echoes the nebulous space and abrupt transitions between specifics of time, place, interrupted activity, and the singularity and absurdity of that period. Tensions and tenderness in her relationships with her partner, her son, and a dear friend on the verge of a lonely death are atomized by the pandemic, dancing in the shadows alongside twisted nightmares, reflections on her career, and visits to dentists, therapists, and other healers. While the text is short, it packs plenty of Nelson’s signature power punches of brilliance and shrewd humor, driving the reader to look between carefully constructed lines that twitch with secrets and memories held and defended. The author’s audit of her physical pain, its undulating waves, and its stubborn betrayal of and distraction to her body and mind serves as a conduit for discerning the necessity of a person’s mouth, voice, and words, cautioning against both exhausting one’s words and stifling a person’s speech, revealing both the power and burden of what is said and what is not.
Dense and striking, to be savored and reread.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798891060111
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Wave Books
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
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