A fairly dreary read about what should be a fascinating subject.
How our sense of hearing affects how we think, feel and act.
“What we think of as sound,” writes Horowitz (Neuroscience and Psychology/Brown Univ.), “is split between two factors, physics and psychology.” This dichotomy forms the framework of the author’s debut book, with chapters examining both how we hear sounds and the effects those sounds have on our brains. Horowitz first spends several chapters on how hearing works, using bullfrogs as the model animal to demonstrate how low-frequency sound works, then flipping to bats to discuss high-frequency sounds. After establishing the physical mechanics of hearing, Horowitz moves on to what he calls “psychophysics”: the relationship between what we hear and how we react. For example, a recording of angry bees is “almost universally frightening”; even elephants will move away from the sound and call out a warning to others. While there are some interesting factoids like this scattered throughout the book—e.g., readers will be surprised to hear that herring emit bubbles from their anuses to make ultrasonic noises—these moments are few and far between, with most examples coming off as bland illustrations for whatever is being analyzed in a particular chapter. Throughout, the prose is stuffy and overly explanatory and academic, and Horowitz punctuates the text with heavy-handed quirky asides. Each chapter begins like a new week’s lecture, and, ultimately, the book never manages to coalesce around any overarching idea.
A fairly dreary read about what should be a fascinating subject.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-090-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
A heap of difficult-to-read information on a relevant topic.
A textbook on “biocatastrophe” as a global public-safety issue.
Biocatastrophe is a term the authors coined for “the simultaneous degradation of the Earth’s principal ecosystems, including those inhabited by humans, as a result of the radical alteration of the Earth’s climate and natural landscapes.” This hefty text aims to explore the causes of biocatastrophe and the significance of its effects on the human and natural world. The authors put this crisis into the context of other ecological crises, like global warming, urbanization, deforestation, mass extinction and loss of ecosystem biodiversity–all of which, they write, are elements of an overarching biocatastrophe. In neatly organized chapters, the authors–who were inspired to write the book after their experiences as volunteer firemen in the 1960s and ’70s–detail the history of human ecology and how biocatastrophe fits into health, politics and economics. The text proves it is up-to-date with contextual information on the global financial crisis and evidence that two seemingly unrelated activities (the environment and the global economy) are indeed linked. Though the authors don’t explicitly describe our future, they strongly hint that Earth’s citizens will have to redefine their values and prepare to live with finite resources. To emphasize the sheer magnitude of biocatastrophe, nothing that can be defined as a military, industrial or commercial activity is spared the author’s dissection. The sentences are packed with information, and an editor would do well to streamline the writing into more digestible servings. The resources in the back of the book are ample–glossary, charts and several appendices provide sources and helpful data.
A heap of difficult-to-read information on a relevant topic.Pub Date: May 11, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9769153-8-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, educational treat for tech heads and other web denizens.
The internet was not meant for the likes of us—and yet we have it, through means that tech historian McCullough capably recounts in this wide-ranging history of the internet era.
It wasn’t so long ago that technologists dismissed the thought that ordinary mortals would have a use for a computer and not so long ago that the internet was a skeletal version of its present self, confined to computers administered by the military-industrial complex. Chalk the change up, writes the author, to the opening of the net to civilian traffic—and then to techies at the University of Illinois who, building on earlier platforms, launched the first browser in 1993, early on called X Mosaic “because it was designed to work with X Window, a graphical user interface popular with users of Unix machines.” If any of the terms in the preceding clause are mysterious, then this book may prove tough slogging, but it has plenty of odd drama. For example, Bill Gates came calling on what later became Netscape, hoping to build an alliance; when rebuffed, he retooled Microsoft in order to build a browser of its own, having quickly divined how important the internet would become. McCullough’s story is populated by numerous geeky heroes, notable among them Steve Jobs but most far less familiar, along with some free-riders and businesspeople who realized that the internet’s free gift to the world was something that could be turned into a cash cow. Writes the author, “the Internet might have been launched in Silicon Valley, but to a large extent, it was monetized by startups in New York City.” Most of the individual components of McCullough’s story, which closes with the arrival of the “completely, conceptually perfect” iPhone in 2007, are well-documented, but few other histories of modern technology connect them so fluently. In this, the narrative resembles Steven Levy’s by now ancient Hackers (1984) and John Markoff’s more recent What the Dormouse Said (2005); it compares favorably to both.
A tasty, educational treat for tech heads and other web denizens.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63149-307-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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