An artful commingling of life with children, environmental mayhem and political-science primer. A great companion to Philip...
Biologist and environmental-health writer Steingraber (Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, 2001, etc.) confronts the hormone-disrupting, brain-damaging toxins our children absorb from the playground to the kitchen floor, and everywhere in between.
A mother of two, the author is extra-sensitive to the many dangers lurking in her children’s everyday experiences. Though she’s occasionally overly sensitive (“I don’t even like having my kids in the kitchen while pasta is cooking or being drained”), Steingraber writes with clarity about many of the poisonous chemical agents that infest our daily lives—the arsenic that leaches from pressure-treated wood, the pesticides on food, PVCs in the kitchen tiling, asbestos and lead paint—and the unique risks they pose to children. The author capably sketches the background of the toxins, the ways in which we are exposed to them and how she has sought to avoid them in the home. The book gets its rhythm and appeal from the twining of science and personal examples—e.g., the time her husband ripped up the tiles on their kitchen floor, only to find asbestos tiles below that and then lead-based paint below that. When it comes to the politics of it all, Steingraber is bracingly elemental. Because the government has simply not done its job of ensuring domestic environmental tranquility, “[t]he way we protect our kids from terrible knowledge is not to hide the terrible knowledge…but to let them watch us rise up in the face of terrible knowledge and do something.”
An artful commingling of life with children, environmental mayhem and political-science primer. A great companion to Philip and Alice Shabecoff’s Poisoned Profits (2008).Pub Date: April 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7382-1399-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Merloyd Lawrence/Da Capo
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An analysis that will appeal more to engineers than to behaviorists and psychologists: informative, but with a relatively...
Leading neuroscientist Montague takes a biomechanical approach to explain the mental processes that occur in decision-making.
Like computers, the human brain processes data and produces a result—but with a twist, declares the author. The gray area of computational neuroscience lies in the value judgments that occur in biological systems. Nature, Montague posits in his debut, has equipped the biological machine with the added ability to determine the significance of a computation. Moreover, by storing these valuations as a byproduct of computation, the mind adapts and becomes increasingly more efficient. Repeated exposure to a typical risk-reward scenario, for example, causes the mind to anticipate outcomes. Montague revisits many of the old “right-brain” scenarios with a “left-brain” approach. With a graduate student, he replicated the famous “Pepsi Challenge” and found no relationship between the drink selected in the test and the drinks that subjects actually purchased in the stores. Though Montague’s research is thorough, his explanations vary from wry to impenetrably abstract, and the definition of value remains elusive. Value may be a burst of dopamine, a goal created from a pattern of inputs from the environment, an abstract emotion such as trust, or anything in-between. The essence of Montague’s work is that biological machines assign a value “tag” to each piece of data that they process. Whether tiny bacteria or human being, this is what differentiates us from the machines we create. The “soul” of the human machine may be the sum of these value tags. The answer to the titular question is itself a value judgment based on individual experience.
An analysis that will appeal more to engineers than to behaviorists and psychologists: informative, but with a relatively narrow audience.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-525-94982-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
There's an elegant, albeit humbling, logic to the first three books in the Science Masters Series, all coming in October. In the middle is Leakey (Origins Reconsidered, 1992, etc.) writing about, well, us. Then, lest we acquire an inflated notion of our own importance, there are the ultimate bookends of the beginning and the end of the universe: The Origin of the Universe, by John D. Barrow (Astronomy/Univ. of Sussex, England; PI in the Sky, 1992, etc.) and The Last Three Minutes, by Paul Davies (Natural Philosophy/Univ. of Adelaide, Australia; The Mind of God, 1991, etc.). The series is being published by an international consortium of 16 publishers. It's a serious, much-needed effort to bring practicing scientists in touch with the general public. Other heavyweight brainiacs lined up for the series include philosopher and cog-sci guy Daniel C. Dennett; paleontologist (and DiMaggiologist) Stephen Jay Gould; anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson; and artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky. This is good publishing. PBS, eat your heart out.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-03135-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
