An orthodox approach that works. Old-fashioned gross anatomy, cell biology, neurochemistry, and physiology are the tools Washington-based neurologist Restak (The Modular Brain, 1994, etc.) uses to teach the wonders of the human brain. Thus, the first chapters recap what we know about the brain's hemispheres and the major landmarks that demarcate areas associated with language, emotion, thought, vision, movements, and the like. These are followed by the essentials of how nerve cells are organized, how they communicate with each other, and the many varieties of chemicals that grease the neural circuitry. To be sure, along the way there are countless examples that illustrate what can go wrong when illness or injury strikes, from all too familiar incurable conditions like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease to more rare syndromes like Lesch-Nyhan, a genetic disease involving self-mutilation. Later, Restak introduces case studies from his own practice and explains how a subject's reports combined with new methods of brain imaging can help pin down the diagnosis as well as illustrate normal brain function. Toward the end of the book Restak comes to grips with some old and new issues: the perennial problems of self-awareness and free will; the ethical dilemma raised by defense lawyers who may argue that their client's neurological illness predisposed them to violence (too simplistic; we don't know enough to eliminate personal responsibility). Equally problematic is the issue of ``improving'' our minds through drugs (like Prozac). Perhaps the question to be raised here is whether such psychoactive drugs improve ``normal'' performance or only correct deficits. Overall, Restak has managed a remarkable sweep of information in a short book: proving that if you lay down your anatomical landmarks in advance, you can lead the reader to some very exciting and promising brain(land)scapes. (15 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6113-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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