A thoughtful, always interesting look into the workings of the mind—and the sometimes-surprising implications of how those...
Science in the service of power can easily be warped and distorted—but, as this book shows, it can sometimes yield unexpected benefits.
Robert G. Heath (1915-1999) was once a widely respected, influential psychiatrist at Tulane University. As neurobiologist-turned–science journalist Frank (My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time, 2012, etc.) writes, Heath’s biologically oriented work found many acolytes, among them a student who lost his academic chair later in life for having “prescribed too many interesting—and illegal—medications” to the university football team. Some of Heath’s work was equally troubling on the ethical front. He likely worked with the CIA on mind control experiments. Moreover, as Frank’s book opens, we find him attempting “to convert a homosexual man to heterosexual preferences through brain stimulation,” having wired electrodes into the patient’s brain’s “pleasure center” and hired a female prostitute to effect the conversion. Heath’s “brain pacemaker,” as he called the electrode device, was applied to dozens of other patients suffering from schizophrenia and depression, a seemingly brutal application save that other remedies were more invasive electroshock treatments and lobotomies. It turns out, writes the author, that although Heath is forgotten or discredited today, he was on to something: what is called “deep brain stimulation” is at the forefront of psychological studies today, with uses that include treating PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Arriving at this conclusion took decades of work in neuroscience, including the ability to study MRI scans of neural centers, among them “brain regions involved with our motivation, our experience of fear, our learning abilities and memory, libido, regulation of sleep, appetite”—in short, activities of interest to industry and government as well as science. Heath’s work may then have application after all, writes Frank, even if one psychiatric technician allows along the way that “maybe he shouldn’t have done that experiment.”
A thoughtful, always interesting look into the workings of the mind—and the sometimes-surprising implications of how those workings have been revealed.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98653-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
