For those who like their science superficial and swaddled in pop culture.
Life is full of mysteries, including the mystery of mystery itself.
After having a book pulled from circulation and losing a New Yorker gig for transgressions such as plagiarism, cherry-picked facts, and invented quotations, Lehrer, sad to say, must be read under the shadow of a question mark. This foray in pop science is similar to his earlier works, though, one hopes, more scrupulously fact checked. Lehrer opens with an explication of what it is that makes us love a mystery story in the first place, citing the originator of the form, Edgar Allan Poe: “Poe’s insight was that the audience didn’t care about the murder….What they really cared about was the mystery.” Mysteries do something to the mind, igniting neurons that try to predict outcomes but, if the story is skillfully told, give way to “subtly violating our expectations, postponing the answer for as long as possible.” The storytelling skills of culture highbrow and middle come under consideration, from Citizen Kane to Law & Order: SVU, all of which make use of what J.J. Abrams calls the “mystery box technique,” which keeps viewers both engaged and puzzled. Lehrer then turns to magic, chronicling his experiences with a statistician who figured out how to beat lottery algorithms and then became fascinated by sleight of hand—again, a species of mystery, “creating a performance we can’t explain.” So far, so good, but then Lehrer stretches the bounds of his thesis to enfold the question of how we perceive and misperceive and are beguiled, incorporating bits and pieces of music lore (John Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” and Bach foremost); the advertising campaign that brought the Volkswagen to America; the merits of the Comic Sans typeface, and the rabbit-duck optical illusion. Lehrer makes a good village explainer—good, as Gertrude Stein said of Ezra Pound, if you’re a village—but the narrative soufflé often threatens to fall as he wanders from subject to subject.
For those who like their science superficial and swaddled in pop culture.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9587-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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 fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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