An outlandish but exhaustively thought-out imagining of humanity’s ultimate destiny.
A searching debut treatise that offers alternatives to typical religious ideas of the afterlife.
Shirvington opens his short, intense discussion with a meditation on the ultimate destiny of humankind that gamely supersedes the usual strictures of organized religions: “The crowning achievement of life on earth so far,” he writes, “is the evolution of a human brain capable of providing a platform for mind and morality.”(Quibblers may point out that other contenders for “crowning achievement” could be whales communicating across hemispheres, but the author is likely talking about human evolution only.) In order to ground his later philosophical discussions, he takes readers on a short but very clear tour of the basic structures of human religious belief, detailing, for example, the differences between deism and theism. He concludes with a provocative question: “If you are disappointed in the gods of the major religions,” he writes, “why not imagine your own god?” Or, more accurately, why not imagine yourself as a god? The author intriguingly asks if the evolution of the human mind, combined with constant advances in interactive computer science, will culminate in a “perfect state of omniscience, omnipotence, and harmony.” Unlike traditional conceptions of God, he writes, this “Universal Algorithm” would exist outside of time and causation and be capable of creating perfect reality simulations, in which every human being could have a kind of holographic afterlife. Shirvington bases his ideas partly on the philosophy of early-20th-century French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and he engagingly enhances those ideas with an overlay of modern computer science to produce a new kind of philosophy—one in which humans are the ghosts in the machine and candidates for digital immortality in a superscientific future. The overall case is deliberately far-fetched, but the author makes it with a very pleasing earnestness. Devoted believers of all faiths, as well as nonbelievers, will likely find it a compelling intellectual exercise.
An outlandish but exhaustively thought-out imagining of humanity’s ultimate destiny.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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