“The mind remains, to a tantalizing degree, a realm of secrets and wonder,” writes the author, and so, too, does the world...
A cerebral ride into the world of the unorthodox.
Sallying forth to take on the benighted creationists, novelist and Esquire contributing editor Storr (The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone, 2014, etc.) takes pause and realizes that his way of thinking is not all that different from what is being presented from the pulpit of the church. Yes, his chosen approach is that of a rationalist, but how biased and compromised is it? What, really, does he know about the nitty-gritty of evolution, unmediated by the fine reasoning of a Darwin or a Dawkins? And where do our beliefs come from? It is unproductive and deluding to simply dismiss a belief as stupid; intelligence does not arbitrate against odd beliefs, for some clearly bright people hold some curious, complex, elusive notions. So Storr ventures with new eyes into their territory, to the outlandish and the heretical, all the while exploring theories of the brain and how it perceives the world. As he notes, each of us is a concoction of sensory pulses that fashions a unique vision: “Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, the brain’s desire to have the outer, real world match its inner models—it takes us part of the way there,” he writes. “It tells us that a properly functioning brain cannot be trusted to think rationally….” The author presents superb stories of visiting with voice-hearers, smug skeptics, sufferers of the Morgellon itch, Holocaust deniers, recovered-memory confabulators, and he combines these stories with his often humorous personal tale—which included experiencing his own murder through the process of hypnosis. Storr’s piercing narrative is piquant and full of surprises and reversals of circumstance, as well as plenty of undeniably valuable information.
“The mind remains, to a tantalizing degree, a realm of secrets and wonder,” writes the author, and so, too, does the world around us, which he entertainingly scours for the possibility of crucial anomalies.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0818-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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