An expert but dense research study of a giant of modern science.
The first of a two-volume scholarly biography of Franz Boas (1858-1942), the father of American anthropology.
Zumwalt (American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent, 1995, etc.), dean emerita at Agnes Scott College, ends this work in 1906, when Boas resigned from New York’s American Museum of Natural History to concentrate on teaching at Columbia. Born in Germany, Boas was fiercely ambitious and fascinated by science from childhood. Despite a doctorate in physics, he took up geography and spent a year studying the Inuit in northern Canada. This began a lifelong interest in non-Western cultures, which included trips to study First Nations peoples in the Pacific Northwest. Dissatisfied with limited opportunities in Germany, he settled permanently in America in 1887. Although quickly recognized, he spent years searching for a steady job, serving as an editor of the journal Science, organizer of the massive ethnology exhibit at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exhibition, and, during an abortive period, head of anthropology at the newly founded Clark College. Financial security came with his appointment as a curator in the American Museum of Natural History in 1896. In 1899, he was named a professor at Columbia, after which his writing and the generation he taught converted anthropology from its clunky, racist origins into a modern scientific discipline. This is a work of academic research, not a popular biography. Readers who doubt that Zumwalt has read every letter, diary, and field note of Boas and his circle will quickly discover their error because her narrative technique is to make a point and then illustrate it with an excerpt from a document. Readers who begin each paragraph and then—upon encountering the first quotation mark—skip to the next will miss little. Nonspecialists will find Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air far more accessible.
An expert but dense research study of a giant of modern science.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4962-1554-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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