An unusual combination of rigor and implausibility.
An unconventional reconsideration of the materialism that dominates modern science.
Debut author Christopher points out that the scientific community, despite its professed commitment to intellectual openness, has a fundamental prejudice: the idea that all human life can be explained on singularly materialistic grounds. He believes that such an explanation fails to account for some basic questions regarding the heritability of innate characteristics; for example, how precisely does DNA transmit cultural predilections? Analogously, how is it that some prodigies seem to be born with extraordinary, unlearned knowledge of a highly technical nature? Christopher persuasively suggests that a materialistic view falls short; the scientific establishment has refused to revise its views, he says, due in part to an irrational disdain for religion. He proposes an alternate theory that posits the existence of transcendental souls that have experienced multiple, reincarnated lives. He then focuses on ways in which the existence of such souls would explain previously irresolvable mysteries, including, he says, innate homosexuality. He then reexamines the relationship between science and religion; although science has been willfully blind to the explanatory power of religion, he says, religion has largely stopped interpreting itself through science: “In addition to their general and all-too-human tendencies toward rigidity,” he says, “I think the big problem facing religions in the modern world is simply their unwillingness to try to make objective sense of their beliefs.” This sentence is a good example of what’s right and wrong with Christopher’s effort: despite the book’s admirable philosophical thoughtfulness, its prose is often needlessly turgid. The author is at his best when exposing the scientific community’s stubborn reluctance to change course and the weaknesses of its regnant ideology. He cleverly employs transcendentalism as a response to these riddles, but his leap to reincarnation will strike most readers as going too far; one can criticize science’s blinkered prejudice and still extol the epistemological value of Occam’s razor. That said, it’s impossible not to be impressed with Christopher’s creativity or his command of scientific debates.
An unusual combination of rigor and implausibility.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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