A well-documented and frightening assessment of America’s fraught relationship with science.
Soplop surveys the dangers of scientific illiteracy and disinformation in this nonfiction book.
In 2020, the United States experienced both the Covid-19 pandemic and record-setting wildfires on the West Coast that destroyed over four million acres. The nation’s “fumbled” responses to both crises, per the author, stem from a “complicated relationship” with scientific information that “has prevented us from digesting and adequately confronting many of the greatest problems of our time.” There is plenty of blame to go around, Soplop asserts, including the rise of social media and “fake news,” which have been effectively exploited by politicians like Donald Trump, and the embrace of postmodernism by academic liberals in the 1970s and 1980s, which deemphasized “objective truth” in favor of “subjectivity.” Divided into four parts, the book begins with a history of science that transitions into conversations about the nature of evidence (emphasizing that not all evidence is “equal”) and how scientists reach a consensus. Parts two and three explore how rampant anti-scientific thought continues to persist into the 21st century. The topics discussed here include not only hot-button, politicized issues like masks, vaccines, and climate change, but also the popularity of “pseudoscience” in the burgeoning wellness industry, whose bevy of products, from essential oils to supplements, fails to stand up to basic scientific inquiry. While much of the book offers a grim portrait of the current state of education and information literacy, it ends with an optimistic appraisal of the promise that scientific methodology offers to solving the major problems of our era and combatting disinformation. To this end, the book’s appendix features a handbook for “Becoming a More Discerning and Less Vulnerable Consumer of Science News and Information.” As a science writer with a graduate degree in medical journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Soplop balances her convincing research (which is backed by over 900 endnotes) with an accessible writing style geared toward readers unfamiliar with scientific scholarship.
A well-documented and frightening assessment of America’s fraught relationship with science.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
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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