Shaken readers may recite the Twenty-fourth Psalm each page. Anyone for the Apocalypse?
Like Fellini’s Roma, the jacket cover here says Robert Ludlum’s The Cassandra Compact—a device we hope doesn’t catch on. Clean-prosist and coauthor Shelby wrote Days of Drums (1996).
Ludlum now hops between Covert-One original trade paperbacks bounced out with way-second-billed coauthors (The Hades Factor, with Gayle Lynds, 2000) and hardcovers written solo (The Prometheus Deception, 2000). Covert-One is the president’s personal, supersecret intelligence group unknown even to CIA, NSA, the Secret Service, or Pentagon. Bowing in as Ludlum & Co.’s fresh new hero in Hades was Colonel Jon Smith, Army doctor and virologist, and his beloved Dr. Sophia Russell, molecular biologist, who died during the outbreak of a new virus that might have wiped out mankind. Cassandra picks up Smith a year later, burying a diamond ring under Sophia’s gravestone, where he meets Dr. Megan Olson, a biochemist who has switched from jobs with the NIH and WHO to being the first alternate on the next space-shuttle mission. Will she be his new love, or will it be Sophia’s sister in Moscow, Randi Russell, who may be CIA? The twist this time is smallpox. The virus has been wiped out, but both the US and Russia keep small quantities to work with if needed. The villain is a nut who wants the Russian sample. But smallpox is too slow-acting for bio-warfare, though up in the microgravity of space, whoosh! its speed and growth turn horrendous—if only he could get the sample up to the space lab. No sooner does Smith get word that the Russian sample has gone astray than pow! it’s blastoff into Ludlumland with bodies dropping in fiery fusillades. Even teams of assassins aren’t safe, being killed off by their own bosses. And when the bugs make it into outer space, mankind faces the big chill.
Shaken readers may recite the Twenty-fourth Psalm each page. Anyone for the Apocalypse?Pub Date: May 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26343-5
Page Count: 356
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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