A tour-de-force intertwining of the clinical, the personal, the fictive, and the philosophical that doesn’t always satisfy,...
A British neuropsychologist puts himself in the picture here, revealing his idiosyncrasies and worrying the issue of what we mean by “self” rather than simply presenting a random sample of bizarre cases.
To be sure, the bizarre is there. A right-frontal brain injury leaves one man bereft of emotions and hard-put to start anything. Another, with a mirror-image, left-brain injury, is helpless to prevent emotionally gushing behavior. An autistic patient has a touch of idiot savantism; another woman believes she is dead; a stroke victim confabulates, speaking volumes of made-up stories about herself. Through all these cases runs the common thread of an altered self. Like all good neuroscientists, Broks eschews Cartesian dualism; for him, there is no such thing as a soul, no mind, no “I” apart from the “meat” of the brain. Consciousness too, is a puzzle, as is the idea that the body is the embodiment of self: the boundaries are too fuzzy. These ponderings have an unsettling effect on the reader. We share Broks’s doubts that science can master the enigmas and follow him as he pursues other strange behaviors, including hallucinations and out-of-body sensations. An interesting essay on Robert Louis Stevenson points out that the ideas for stories like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde often came to him in vivid dreams. A science-fiction piece ponders what might happen in space travel if, by some mistake the self that was supposed to disintegrate and re-form on Mars doesn’t, so there are two not quite identical self replicas. Broks has been called the new Oliver Sacks, but he’s not. They both display empathy and intellectual curiosity, but while Sacks is always lyrical yet exact, Broks writes like an impressionist painter, splashing his canvas with vivid colors that capture a moment with emotional force and mystery.
A tour-de-force intertwining of the clinical, the personal, the fictive, and the philosophical that doesn’t always satisfy, but certainly keeps the pages turning.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-901-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science...
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.
Award-winning scientist Jahren (Geology and Geophysics/Univ. of Hawaii) delivers a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world.
The author’s father was a physics and earth science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Both of these early influences engrossingly combine in this adroit story of a dedication to science. Jahren’s journey from struggling student to struggling scientist has the narrative tension of a novel and characters she imbues with real depth. The heroes in this tale are the plants that the author studies, and throughout, she employs her facility with words to engage her readers. We learn much along the way—e.g., how the willow tree clones itself, the courage of a seed’s first root, the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, and the airborne signals used by trees in their ongoing war against insects. Trees are of key interest to Jahren, and at times she waxes poetic: “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” The author draws many parallels between her subjects and herself. This is her story, after all, and we are engaged beyond expectation as she relates her struggle in building and running laboratory after laboratory at the universities that have employed her. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student at Berkeley and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist.
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87493-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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