A comprehensive, nuanced picture of Pavlov's life and times and his seminal contributions to science.
An expansive scholarly biography of Russia's most eminent scientist.
Todes (Institute of History of Medicine/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Pavlov's Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise, 2001, etc.) traces the evolution of Ivan Pavlov's groundbreaking discoveries in the context of Russian history over the span of his life (1849-1936). This is the culmination of a decadeslong study of the scientist, whose name is iconic in the world of behaviorist psychology but whose work, according to Todes, is misunderstood. The author establishes that, unlike American behaviorists, Pavlov never “denied the importance or even the existence of an inner, subjective world. He also never used the term “conditioned reflex.” He used the term “conditional” to describe the salivation of dogs expecting food upon receiving a signal such as the sound of a bell. The intention of the term was to distinguish “conditional reflexes,” which might or might not occur, from automatic, unconditional responses—e.g., caused by direct contact of food with the salivary glands. By the time Pavlov embarked on his well-known work with dogs, he had already received the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to him in 1904 for his studies on digestive physiology. These involved tracing how the arousal of appetite acted to stimulate “the secretory nerves of the gastric glands” and was followed up by excitations produced when food “excites the specialized nerves in the mucous membrane of the stomach.” Politically a liberal, Pavlov welcomed the 1905 revolution, but he was not a supporter of the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, his prominence on the international stage was significant enough that he was able to pursue his research and even travel abroad. In 1935, a year before his death, he organized and hosted the International Congress of Physiologists in Leningrad.
A comprehensive, nuanced picture of Pavlov's life and times and his seminal contributions to science.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-0199925193
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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