The prolific Asimov cuts another notch in his smoking keyboard by collaborating with space-specialist White—this time to summarize ten millennia of human expansion and achievements and add a few worn words of wisdom for the difficult times ahead. Considering the scope of their project, which looks both ways at the problematic course of human progress, the authors have their work cut out for them, but they manage to hack and hew the past into a rough shape, encompassing the birth of civilization together with some of its subsequent highs and lows. For the early millennia the focus falls on the Middle East, with some slight attention given to developments in China and the Indian subcontinent. This pattern, once established, remains constant until recent changes in Europe and North America enter the picture in the current millennium; contributions from Africa—with the exceptions of Egypt and ancient Carthage—and South America are almost completely ignored, giving the historical outline a distinct ethnocentric bias. Advancements in agriculture, commerce, writing, and technology are duly noted, but the dominant features at every turn are the innumerable paths of conquest throughout recorded history, from 3000 B.C. to modern times. The effort to demonstrate the futility of empire-building and the persistent citation of population figures provide links to a scenario for the future, in which a decline in birth rates, pursuit of renewable energy resources, and the choice of world trade over world war are viewed as essential for survival of our species—at least until colonization of the solar system becomes possible as a means for humanity to find more breathing room. The familiar "greatest hits" approach to history, with little that's new for the frontiers of the future either. Painless and pointless, to the extent that even Asimov fans should have second thoughts.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1990
ISBN: 0802773915
Page Count: -
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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