An absorbing and poignant exploration of the human brain.
An acclaimed writer reflects on neurology, intuition, and Zen in this collection of essays and articles.
Shainberg, the author of multiple novels and nonfiction works, became obsessed with understanding his own neurology (“e.g., the brain that was producing the book”) while writing Memories of Amnesia in the 1970s. In researching that 1988 novel about the implications of brain damage, he had seven months of hospital access to neurosurgeons, patients, and staff. His half-century desire to understand the contradictions of the human mind is displayed in this compilation of essays and articles, many of which were first printed in the ’70s in publications like The New York Times Magazine and Harper’s Magazine. The titular essay centers on the ubiquitous sports phenomenon of hot streaks, where an athlete is on a transcendent run of making three-point shots in basketball, hammering home runs in baseball, or hitting bullseyes in archery. Regardless of the euphoria experienced by fans and teammates who witness these moments of athletic grandeur, “Hot Hands” are not a statistical reality, no matter how “brutal, sacrilegious, and seemingly inarguable” the phenomenon may be. In making this point, Shainberg references peer-reviewed studies. The author similarly uses the New York City Marathon in his essay “Going Nowhere Fast” to examine intuition-defying examples of how the “psychodrama” of sports conflicts with scientific reality. Another major theme of the book is the powerful neurological revelations offered through Zen practice. Essays, such as “The Violence of Just Sitting,” dissect Shainberg’s experiences with the devotion of “sesshin” and long periods of meditative sitting. In part a commemoration of the author’s distinguished career as an essayist, the volume pays particular attention to the interconnectedness of Zen, neurology, and creativity, ruminating on the mental processes behind Shainberg’s own work as well as others (an entire essay, for instance, centers on Zelda Fitzgerald). The collection excels at distilling the complexities of modern neuroscience into real-world examples in sports, literature, and spirituality. This emphasis on practicality is balanced with the literary sophistication and the gripping storytelling of a skilled novelist.
An absorbing and poignant exploration of the human brain.Pub Date: July 6, 2023
ISBN: 9798396049260
Page Count: 221
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
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