An open-minded inquiry into animals’ precognitive capabilities from Sheldrake (Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, 1995), attentive to the evidence and thoroughly investigative, conducted in the belief that science can be fun and rigorous, inquisitive as well as skeptical. Do animals possess telepathy? What lies behind their uncanny sense of direction? What is it chickens know that the scientists studying earthquakes do not? Sheldrake, a British biochemnist, has gathered a vast number of case histories documenting animals, from dogs and cats to horses and parakeets, that can tell when their owners are coming home, animals that anticipate epileptic seizures and air raids, cats that can tell who is on the phone, animals that find their human families after being separated by huge distances, not to mention the whole fabulous act known as migration. By way of explanation, Sheldrake proposes the possibility of what he calls morphic fields, self-organizing regions of influence, invisible blueprints as it were, with both spatial and temporal aspects, that interconnect and organize a system. Within the elasticity of the morphic field, “channels of telepathic communication” operate over the vastness of space—the type of connectedness witnessed in quantum entanglement theory—and the fields, large and small, specific and nonlocal, possess a collective memory, an instinct for habitual patterns shaped through experience. Sheldrake situates all this within ideas currently entertained by physicists and cosmologists and migration theorists and others, so that the word “preposterous” never seems applicable. What would be preposterous is trying to explain away the incidence of animal prescience and precognition as irrelevant and the product of wishful thinking, or to dismiss the potential that animals may have to forewarn events from medical crises to seismic upheavals, examples of which abound in these pages and not infrequently flabbergast. Sheldrake is a pleasure not just because he roams way beyond the mechanistic theory of nature, but because he appreciates worthy new questions as well as answers, one such being the time-honored “Why?” (b&w photos and drawings, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60092-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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