An astonishingly accessible biology introduction that should especially appeal to devout Christians.
A retired nurse provides an explanatory tour of the human body and discusses its intricacy as evidence of God’s design.
The world of scientific explanations and the spiritually miraculous are rarely presented as compatible, but debut author Wilferd does exactly that. She announces her dual aims: to furnish an “easy-to-read and easy-to-understand” account of the body’s various parts and functions, and to show that “humans are the most complex and beautiful of all creation.” She impressively achieves her first goal, surveying the body’s biological structure with encyclopedic thoroughness. The author examines its cellular structure and DNA, the composition and work of blood and the circulatory system, the “musculoskeletal system,” and the body’s sundry parts and roles in keeping people alive. She also supplies a remarkably lucid account of the ways in which the body defends itself from sickness and disease, breathes, digests, and reproduces. Wilferd repeatedly observes that the body is amazingly efficient and gifted with an elaborate architecture, both “evidence of the miraculous Hand of God at work.” For example, a discussion of the nature of blood is followed by one about the “precious blood of Jesus,” and a wonderfully concise account of the lysosome comes immediately before a report about the genetic link between Mary and Jesus. The author permits herself some edifying digressions, too, about the health risks of smoking and circumcision and the danger of shaken baby syndrome. Wilferd’s presentation of the body is not just lucid, but also artfully synoptic—she reduces complex biological issues to their most basic parts without oversimplification or condescension. Her book could serve as a useful short reference guide or an introduction for newcomers to the subject. In addition, even if readers disagree with the author’s theological inferences, she still persuasively demonstrates the marvel that is the human body. But she can become dogmatically strident when it comes to the issue of conception: “No one who understands DNA can deny that life begins at conception.” Of course, lots of geneticists, right or wrong, do precisely that.
An astonishingly accessible biology introduction that should especially appeal to devout Christians.Pub Date: June 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4984-0401-3
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Xulon Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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