A beautifully balanced and comprehensive history of ``scientific creationism.'' Although Numbers (History of Science and Medicine/Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison; Prophetess of Health, 1976) is a staunch evolutionist, he professes sympathy for creationists, a product of his Seventh-Day Adventist childhood. The result is a book of crisp, cool intelligence that avoids polemic as it untangles the colorful ideas and personalities that shaped creationism. Modern Americans- -47% of whom embrace creationism, according to a Gallup poll, and 86% of whom favor teaching it alongside Darwinism in the public schools—may be surprised to learn that until a few decades ago, creationists accepted the antiquity of the earth and the validity of fossils, holding to either the ``day-age'' theory (each biblical day of creation was eons long) or the ``gap'' theory (after the initial creation, millennia passed before God made Eden). All changed with George MacCready Price, an armchair scientist and occasional construction worker whose 726-page textbook, The New Geology, dated the earth at less than 10,000 years and claimed that a massive flood (the one Noah survived) gave birth to the fossil record. This ``flood geology'' rules creationism today, which has received a remarkable boost through bestselling books, the support of scores of scientists, and massive publicity from the ``creation trials'' of the 1980's. Numbers notes that creationism is now a self-critical field with strict ethical standards, while orthodox science too often bashes the opposition through blatant prejudice and arrogance. Creationism is in its heyday, he says, with its ``shocking success'' most marked among Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and evangelical Protestants. Numbers's objectivity, eye for anecdote, and knack for deciphering the enigmas of science and pseudoscience make this the best history of creationism to date—a landmark work in the field. (Twenty-four b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40104-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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