A useful stepping-off point for a relevant topic that will require further study and debate.
A religious scholar warns against nature worship in all its forms in this examination of the belief that natural products are always superior and that natural laws correctly dictate human behavior.
Levinovitz, who teaches religious studies at James Madison University, believes that “nature” and “natural” have mistakenly become synonyms for “God” and “holy.” Accordingly, consumers today often think that whatever is promoted as natural automatically has positive values for one’s health and for the environment. But nature’s goodness should not be taken on faith. “Unlearning the orthodoxies of nature worship,” writes the author, “will be liberating—and not just from the guilt of feeding our children the occasional non-organic snack. It will allow us to seek complicated truths instead of being tied to mythic binaries.” Levinovitz tackles an array of subjects—e.g., natural childbirth, artificial flavorings, the close-to-nature lifestyle of early humans, natural healing, women in sports, and social Darwinism—and usually offers helpful examples to provide context. He quotes pointedly, but when advancing his own arguments, he doesn’t mince words. Levinovitz assails Deepak Chopra for his involvement with Wellness Real Estate, whose multimillion-dollar condos promise to align the buyer with nature’s intended rhythms; Gwyneth Paltrow for her expensive lifestyle brand, Goop; and Whole Foods Market for its “uniting claims about material quality and ethical quality under the rubric of what’s natural.” Indeed, shopping at Whole Foods transforms into “consecrated consumption, in which the ritual of shopping becomes a kind of spiritualized retail therapy dedicated to nature.” The author also examines myths about violations of so-called natural law, among them homosexuality and interracial sex, which have been regarded as having deleterious effects on society and hence have been legislated against; and the Catholic Church’s controversial stances regarding birth control and reproduction. In Levinovitz’s view, the core problem is the confirmed certainty about the goodness of nature when in fact, “our relationship to nature is paradoxical and uncertain.”
A useful stepping-off point for a relevant topic that will require further study and debate.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1087-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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