Smart authors with a lot of hot stuff to report on, but they should cool it a bit.
What makes us human? A combination of genes and developmental programs interacting with an environment that shapes the brain across the life span, declare two California neuroscientists.
Dubbing their study of these complex interactions “cultural biology,” Quartz (director of Caltech’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab) and Sejnowski (director of the Salk Institute’s Computational Neurobiology Lab) condemn evolutionary psychology’s argument that we are cast adrift in modern society with our old hunter-gatherer savannah lifestyle. Neither naturists nor nurturists, the authors defend their not-unreasonable thesis by pointing to a detailed geological record showing rapid climate change. This called for maximum flexibility in adaptation, they contend, and probably helped build bigger brains, tools, and a habit of living in groups. Quartz and Sejnowski describe an infant’s survival mechanisms as an “internal guidance system” that will endure even as that individual’s “user’s guide to life” comes online as a result of the sociocultural shaping of the slow-to-mature prefrontal cortex and its anterior cingulate. These brain parts are key to planning, judging, and decision-making and are also linked to emotion and motivation. A derailment in these areas, specifically a hyperarousal of the orbitofrontal cortex, may be responsible for the mass suicide of cultists, group violence, and killings by high-school misfits, the authors conjecture. While they admit that the brain is more complex than we can fathom, they are ready to discourse on learning, love, intelligence, personality, and happiness, often pointing to anatomical pathways and neurochemicals as clues: low serotonin in depression and suicide, oxytocin in love, and so on. They are also quite prescriptive in later chapters. What should we to do to achieve “successful aging” and rescue American society from increasing depression and isolation? Leave the TV and Net, go out and work in the community.
Smart authors with a lot of hot stuff to report on, but they should cool it a bit.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-688-16218-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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