A challenging, well-researched work that clearly shows the interconnectedness of scientific and social thought.
A history of the concept of race in American scientific thought.
Yudell (Public Health/Drexel Univ.; co-editor: The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life, 2002) traces how the concept of race evolved from the eugenicists of the early 20th century to present-day geneticists. He argues that the biologic concept of race originated with eugenic theories of race difference, was integrated into modern biologic thought by evolutionary biologists in the 1930s and ’40s, and continues to generate controversy as a classification tool. In examining the history of racial science, Yudell looks at the work of specific scientists and institutions, among them the eugenicist Charles Davenport and the National Research Council in the 1920s and ’30s, evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, population geneticist L.C. Dunn, anthropologist Ashley Montagu and UNESCO in the 1940s and ’50s. The author’s account of the controversy aroused by Carleton Coon’s The Origin of Races (1962) makes especially interesting reading, as do his discussions of the pseudoscientific work of Alfred Jensen and William Shockley and the clash between sociobiologist E.O. Wilson and evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin in the 1970s. In the final chapter, “Race in the Genomic Age,” Yudell tackles the impact of the genomic revolution on the biological race concept. Scientists who use the race concept in genomic research claim that technological improvements allow them to examine human diversity unhampered by social prejudice. Social and natural scientists argue that the race concept is a flawed, inaccurate way to measure human diversity inseparable from social prejudice. Genome scientists say that the race concept is not accurate but is a useful proxy in clinical settings. J. Craig Venter, who wrote the foreword, opines that instead of relying on an individual’s appearance or self-identified ethnicity, looking directly at his genomic sequence is the best way to personalize medicine. The controversy continues.
A challenging, well-researched work that clearly shows the interconnectedness of scientific and social thought.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-16874-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
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