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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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