A satisfying insider’s excursion into the scientific realities behind CSI-style pop culture.
From a bestselling mystery author, a curiosity-fueled look at the realities behind crime science.
Scotland-based McDermid (The Skeleton Road, 2014, etc.) has published 29 novels, but she approaches the grisly realities of crime scenes and corpses with a neophyte’s sense of wonder. In the preface, she notes that “crime fiction proper only began with an evidence-based legal system [that] those pioneering scientists and detectives bequeathed us.” True to this notion of a historical debt, the author discusses forensic science’s development by identifying the first cases solved by insect analysis, ballistics, and other once-radical tactics. She focuses on topics ranging from toxicology and blood spatter to innovations in DNA replication and forensic anthropology. For each, she provides an approachable scientific overview and a narrative of significant cases, interspersed with commentary from top forensic investigators (one of whom tartly observes about her peers’ formidable senses of certainty, “they are not being trained to think that an opinion is an opinion”). McDermid is clearly fascinated by odd, obscure historical details—e.g., the French once called arsenic “inheritance powder”; fingerprinting was used in India and Argentina before it was trusted in England or America. The author establishes that public interest in forensics is nothing new; since the early 20th century, these new types of scientists were made into celebrities by “scores of journalists, hungry for a ‘scientist foils serial killer’ headline.” McDermid emphasizes the meticulousness of these professionals and claims that they learn from flawed cases, which become notorious among them, and for good reason: “If it suits the [defense] lawyer’s narrative, they will undermine first a scientist’s testimony and then their good name.” The author concludes by arguing that accelerating innovations in forensic science make the apprehension of violent felons ever likelier, noting how DNA technology has solved numerous cold cases, and forensic anthropology has proved equally useful for investigating child pornographers and mass graves in Kosovo.
A satisfying insider’s excursion into the scientific realities behind CSI-style pop culture.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2391-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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