Enjoyable popular science.
An overview of the five traditional senses, plus a few others.
“A sense can be defined as a faculty that detects a specific stimulus by means of a receptor dedicated to that stimulus,” writes Ward, director of the Animal Behaviour Lab at the University of Sydney and author of The Social Lives of Animals. Light activates receptors in the retina, and taste receptors “coat our tongues,” but nothing happens without the brain, which converts electrical impulses into our sensual experiences. Colors do not exist; we see “red” because that’s how the brain interprets certain electrical wavelengths. As the author shows, the brain evolved for survival, not accuracy. It can’t handle every sensory input, so it seeks patterns, takes shortcuts, cuts corners, and sees, hears, tastes, or smells what it expects on the basis of past experience. Ward devotes the most space to vision. “Sight involves a vast number of sensory receptors…and consumes more of the brain’s resources than all the rest of our senses combined,” writes the author. Despite writing and sign language, sound remains preeminent in human communication. A molecule becomes a smell or taste when it hits a receptor inside our nose or mouth, and smell is responsible for up to 80% of our taste. As the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated, losing the ability to smell limits the pleasure of eating. Long before language evolved, touch was the primary means by which humans communicated, and it remains essential for taking in information on our surroundings and registering pain. It’s also the indispensable catalyst for relationships. We constantly touch those around us, and infants require touch to develop normally. Ward also notes how scientists have no doubt that other senses exist. Balance, for one, is no mean feat and requires its own specialized organ in the ear. Many animals sense Earth’s magnetic field in order to navigate, and Ward describes some studies that demonstrate its presence in humans.
Enjoyable popular science.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781541600850
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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