A generous, involving study of how ancient stargazing gave rise to many of the tenets of human civilization.
Dietrich provides a wide-ranging study of ancient astronomies.
In this densely packed study, Dietrich (Origin of Culture, 2005) tells his readers, “Many great scholars and astronomers have agreed that mathematics, geometry, and astronomy are the common language of humankind,” and in these pages, he attempts to lay out a grammar of that common language. In 10 fast-paced, well-illustrated chapters, the guide ranges across ancient and prehistoric human culture, from the designs of temples in Angkor Wat and Tikal to the commonalities of origin myths in ancient Greek, Hebrew and Egyptian literatures. Dietrich contends that astronomical concepts and applications formed the foundation of the ancient cultures he studies. It’s a thought-provoking thesis, made all the more provocative by some of the author’s claims, such as that “multiple underground water spirals and aquifers” gave impetus to the building of such disparate sacred places as Stonehenge, Karnak, Giza, the Temple Mount at Jerusalem and Tenochtitlan. More troubling for some readers will be Dietrich’s casual pronouncements: “The universe works because everything was set in motion at once, allowing everything to adjust, conform, coordinate with everything else.” He tells us at one point, “The universe is traveling toward perfect numbers and perfect harmony.” This is a bit overreaching; ancient cosmologies may talk about perfect harmony, but it plays little part in modern physics. That study is nevertheless expertly done, thanks to the author’s convincingly comprehensive view, which smoothly encompasses a great deal of fascinating information and presents ancient cosmological knowledge in accessible terms.
A generous, involving study of how ancient stargazing gave rise to many of the tenets of human civilization.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1935098751
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bascom Hill Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.
The groundbreaking Black lesbian writer and activist chronicles her experience with cancer.
In her mid-40s, Lorde (1934-1992) was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. Through prose, poems, and selected journal entries beginning six months after the surgery, the author explores the anger, pain, and fear that her illness wrought. Her recovery was characterized by resistance and learning to love her body again. She envisioned herself as a powerful fighter while also examining the connection between her illness and her activism. “There is no room around me in which to be still,” she writes, “to examine and explore what pain is mine alone—no device to separate my struggle within from my fury at the outside world’s viciousness, the stupid brutal lack of consciousness or concern that passes for the way things are. The arrogant blindness of comfortable white women. What is this work all for? What does it matter if I ever speak again or not?” Lorde confronts other tough questions, including the role of holistic and alternative treatments and whether her cancer (and its recurrence) was preventable. She writes of eschewing “superficial spirituality” and repeatedly rejecting the use of prosthesis because it felt like “a lie” at precisely the time she was “seeking new ways of strength and trying to find the courage to tell the truth.” Forty years after its initial publication and with a new foreword by Tracy K. Smith, the collection remains a raw reckoning with illness and death as well as a challenge to the conventional expectations of women with cancer. More universally, Lorde’s rage and the clarity that follows offer us a blueprint for facing our mortality and living boldly in the time we have. This empowering compilation is heartbreaking, beautiful, and timeless.
Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313520-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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