A fascinating tour of the unexpected traces of our passage through the world, and the persistent forces that erase them.
What we leave behind.
Mullaney, a Stanford scholar who has written four books on Chinese history and technology, describes himself as “a historian interested in how things disappear.” Jolted by his father’s death, he seeks understanding with a historian’s tools, peering through an archival lens. In the process, he takes us on a deeply moving philosophical journey, exploring the physical evidence we leave behind as we transit through our lives. Short, quickly flowing chapters are packed with closely observed details on human traces drawn from broad swaths of research in photography, biology, physics, and cultural studies. The connecting thread is entropy, in all its forms, throughout history. Wax cylinders from Thomas Edison’s day can’t be played on a phonograph, which would ruin them. New techniques to digitize their surfaces recover the sounds, yet digital files are also on a path to entropy. Mullaney explores the many forms of information objects orbiting our lives—birth and death certificates, sonograms, family photos freezing a moment in time, genetic profiles—all reflections of aspects of experience, yet are frozen, limited, and partial views that fail to capture most of the intimate human experience. Simply digitizing physical archives, a monumental task, will not prevent their entropy. Mullaney invokes Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, who believes much of the contemporary record is housed in “destined-to-disappear platforms such as Slack, Gmail, Facebook DM, and more.” Some analogies may strike readers as a stretch—comparing airbrushing someone out of a photo to ghosting them on social media, for example—but most are memorable, even visceral, visualizations of the many forms of disintegration. Mullaney’s archival explorations are ultimately comforting, reconnecting him to his family and the world.
A fascinating tour of the unexpected traces of our passage through the world, and the persistent forces that erase them.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781324020783
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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