This engaging blend of new research and personal experience tackles fundamental questions about existence and awareness.
An expert in medical resuscitation explores emerging evidence that calls for new thinking about life, death, and purpose.
The reality of life is that death comes for us all, whether we accept it gracefully or rail against the fading of the light. However, research over the past decade has revealed a more complicated picture than a simple binary, writes Parnia, author of Erasing Death and director of critical care and resuscitation research at New York University School of Medicine. In his latest book, the author examines the strands of current research, many based on new developments in brain-scanning technology. One of the most intriguing is evidence that after the brain “dies,” there can sometimes be a sudden surge of electrical activity, much more powerful than the usual level of activity. Parnia suggests that this is a postdeath “hyper-consciousness,” which might connect with the experiences of people who have shown all the signs of death but have somehow returned to life, due to resuscitation or through an unexplained process. The returnees have a common story to tell, regardless of their cultural background or religious beliefs, and they often feel a compulsion to recount the experience. There are hundreds of such cases, writes the author—far too many to ignore. This raises difficult issues about consciousness, the self, neuroscience, and the line between life and death, and there are no simple answers. Some people might find some of the author’s stories disturbing, although that is certainly not Parnia’s intention. “We are at the cusp of the exploration of a new frontier of science,” he writes. “I have little doubt that, in the future, people who would be declared dead today will be routinely brought back to life.”
This engaging blend of new research and personal experience tackles fundamental questions about existence and awareness.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780306831287
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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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