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Thought-provoking essays
| Customer Rating:   | | This is an interesting collection of essays. Some are relevant and thought-provoking for today. Others were a bit dated and too focused on the build-up of nuclear weapons. The author's voice is down to earth and approachable, yet authoritative and experienced. |
Provocative Essays and Social Comment on Science and Humanities
| Customer Rating: | The twenty-four, short essays in Late Night Thoughts On Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony remain surprisingly fresh and fascinating today. While many focus on new discoveries in biology, medicine, and physics, Lewis Thomas also offers a sobering look at the dark side of modern technology. The title essay (the last one in this collection) is particularly haunting.
I almost set this book aside after reading The Unforgettable Fire, the first essay in this collection. Thomas Lewis had awakened in me uncomfortable memories of a distant past. Among my first lessons in kindergarten was to move quickly to the basement when the alarms rang, to crouch down, and to cover my neck with my hands. Along with many others of my generation, I came to accept that nuclear war was virtually inevitable.
Lewis Thomas balances the more serious essays with others characterized by enthusiasm, wonder and excitement for the world about us. His observations are often surprising, and nearly always provocative. Admittedly, a few essays are becoming dated, but this collection is still quite interesting. A few examples include:
The Lie Detector: our physiological response to telling a lie - even when we do it for protection or personal advantage - is sufficiently stressful to be detectable, suggesting that there is at least some physiological compulsion for humans to be honest.
On Speaking of Speaking: Children not only learn languages much more readily than adults, but they seem also to play a key role in shaping and restructuring language, especially in a mixed language setting. Perhaps that period called childhood is ultimately the source of the thousands of languages and dialects that characterize human societies.
On Smell: The short-lived olfactory receptor cells are themselves proper brain cells although not residing in the brain. The storage of olfactory memories remains a mystery.
On the Need for Asylums: A society can be judged by how it treats its most disadvantaged, its least beloved, its mad. We must be judged a poor lot for closing institutions and turning mentally ill inmates onto the streets.
The Problem of Dementia: Lewis asks not only for more funding, but for a qualitatively different approach, one that funds long term studies, freeing researchers from the need to continuously publish results.
Trained at Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, Lewis Thomas held positions at the University of Minnesota Medical School, New York University-Bellevue Medical Center, and Yale University Medical School. Subsequently, he became president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He began publishing essays in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1971; nearly all of the essays in this collection were originally published in Discover Magazine. |
Essays on humankind's accomplishments--and its dementia
| Customer Rating: | The title of this collection alone conjures up a pipe-smoking, fireside dilettante charming his friends with eclectic observations on random but serious subjects. Take away the pipe and the Renaissance man you've envisioned would indeed look a lot like Lewis Thomas, who wrote dozens of breezy, perceptive, witty essays on subjects as varied as the seven wonders of the modern world, the evolution of language, incidents of fraud in science, the faculty of smell, and the onerousness of politics.
Most of these essays appeared in Discover magazine in the early 1980s, and although Thomas introduces current events into his discussions, his subjects are timeless. A notable preoccupation, however, is with the nuclear threat and the irrational thinking that fueled the arms race and, more troubling, the planning for tactical nuclear warfare. Although the Cold War has passed and the threat has greatly diminished (but not vanished), the essays on this subject serve both as reminders that the challenges we currently face (terrorism, global warming, sectarianism) are hardly unprecedented in their peril and as investigations into the madness and stupidity that fear alone can unleash.
The fact that military strategists were (and are) actually planning scenarios for a limited nuclear war can, upon rational reflection, only shock and dismay. While enumerating some of the impressive (if time-consuming and expensive) advances in surgery and therapy, for example, Thomas reminds us, "There exists no medical technology that can cope with the certain outcome of just one small, neat, so-called tactical bomb exploded over a battlefield. . . . If you go ahead with this business, the casualties you will instantly produce are beyond the reach of any health-care system." All the emergency drills, the plans for evacuations, and the crisis management training are for naught. The certain horrific outcome of such "strategies" is why medical professionals like Thomas wouldn't--and won't--have anything to do with their planning ("count us out")--not because they are pacifists, but because they are realists. Lewis Thomas listens to Mahler and begs his readers for reason. |
What a pleasure
| Customer Rating: | It is simply a great pleasure to read the essays of Lewis Thomas. His intelligence, his balance, his sense of wonder, his great knowledge his humility and sense of human values , his masterly and often poetic writing ability make each of the essays an adventure of discovery and delight.
In the opening essay he considers the horrifying consequences of nuclear war, and argues urgently that Mankind must cease being its own worse enemy, and threatening itself in a way no natural phenomenom could.
In many of the other essays he argues for the centrality of the human, and the terrestial. In surveying the cosmos he wonders at the remarkable beauty and singularity, the intricate complexity of the Earth.
He writes about the sense of smell, and wonders how it is we do not have the power to reimagine what we smell the way we can reimagine and recreate what we see and hear.He returns in his essays 'Things Unflattened by Science to the subject of his first and perhaps most well- known work 'The Living Cell'.
Here is a description of the evolution of the cell, a description which provides a sample of his own exceptionally clear and vivid style.
"The oxygen in today's atmosphere is almost entirely the result of phosynthetic living, which had its start with the appearance of blue- green algae among the micro-organisms. It was very likely that this first step -or evolutionary jump- that led to the subsequent differntiation into eukaryotic , nucleated cell, and there is almost no doubt that these new cells were pieced together by the symbiotic joining up of prokaryote. The chloroplasts in today's green plants, which capitalize on the sun's energy to produce the oxygen in our atmosphere, arethe lineal descendants of ancient blue- green algae. The mitochondria in all our cells, which utilize the oxygen for securing energyfrom plant food, are the progeny of ancient oxidative bacteria. Collectively, we are still, in a fundamental sense, a tissue of microbial organisms living off the sun, decorated and ornamented these days by the elaborate architectural structures that the molecules have constructed for their living quarters, including seagrass, foxes and of course ourselves. ' |
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