A visually fascinating study featuring dazzling photographs and artwork.
A heavily illustrated volume about twins and popular attitudes toward them.
Uncommon but not rare, twins have created a stir throughout history, writes British researcher and writer Viney, himself a twin and author of Waste: A Philosophy of Things. In the past, twins were mostly viewed as a curse: killers of the sick, harmers of livestock and crops, embodiments of evil. As the author chronicles, “common sense” made it obvious that women who bore twins had had sex with two men, so they were considered debauched and their children tainted; twin infanticide has been documented everywhere. On the positive side, twins were sometimes viewed as harbingers of good fortune, and they frequently played heroic roles in creation myths. A single egg that divides before fertilization gives rise to identical twins with identical DNA, but about two-thirds of twins are grown from two different eggs and are as genetically varied as ordinary siblings. In the modern age, twins have appeared in paranoid fiction by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Charlotte Brontë, Dostoevsky, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Viney’s most compelling pages explore twins in the arts, especially in theater and films familiar to many readers, but he also covers scientists’ investigations of twins’ real-life experiences and attributes. These chapters deliver a painless if often lurid education into such areas as criminal identification, eugenics, racism, and psychology. Studies of identical twins, especially those raised separately, became central to the debate on the influence of nature versus nurture in human development. Viney often focuses on controversial studies and the belief that identical twins have a paranormal connection, expressing mild skepticism but only after providing many vivid anecdotes. Other authors delve more deeply, but it’s unlikely that any match his spectacular illustrations, which occupy as much space as the text.
A visually fascinating study featuring dazzling photographs and artwork.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780691254753
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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