Although a bit dry in spots, Adamson’s crafty enthusiasm is infectious.
The impact and significance of the objects we shape and live with.
Adamson (Senior Scholar/Yale Center for British Art; The Invention of Craft, 2013, etc.) writes that “we are in danger of falling out of touch, not only with objects, but with the intelligence they embody: the empathy that is bound up in tangible things.” He takes us on a winding, personal tour of material intelligence, the world of things; sadly, “our collective material intelligence has steadily plummeted.” The author seeks to paint a “full, kaleidoscopic picture of material experience. Making things, using them, and learning about them.” The book is rich with examples and stories of objects and their makers. Early on, Adamson invites us to take the “Paper Challenge”: What is the best way to evenly divide a piece of paper? He also asks why the materiality of stuffed animals is significant, and he writes in awe about how experts split diamonds and the importance of tools. A fretsaw, a laser cutter, a Jacquard loom—all are “repositories of accumulated material intelligence.” Adamson discusses the importance of touch in making and appreciating things. A visit to Brussels Musical Instruments Museum teaches us how to navigate the displays with our ears as well as our eyes. The author also provides brief history lessons on plywood, aluminum, vulcanized rubber, linoleum, and how a material “rises into fashion, falls out of fashion, then rises again.” He introduces us to many fascinating people and their achievements: “one of America’s greatest basket makers” Dorothy Gill Barnes; master woodcarver David Esterly; Ian Hutchings, who’s “interested in what happens when things rub up against one another;” Murage Ngani Ngatho, master coconut carver; and Constance Adams, a “space architect” for NASA. Interested in footwear? Belgian design researcher Catherine Willems combines “ancient wisdom with new technologies” studying sandals made with reindeer, buffalo, and antelope skin.
Although a bit dry in spots, Adamson’s crafty enthusiasm is infectious.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-964-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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