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Title: Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony by Lewis Thomas ISBN: 0-14-024328-3 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Winner
Comment: If you are looking for a short, exquisite book about humanity and life and science (and the connection among all three) look no further. Lewis Thomas gives just the right touch, always keeping the writing at the educated layman's level.
Starting with an outdated plea for peace (the USSR was still semi-viable at this time) he touches on human senses - sight, smell, hearing, touch, language - and inserts a brilliant little chapter on his own Seven Modern Wonders. Essays on altruism, music in all its splendored forms and the brain follow. The last chapter is a requiem for life and the loss of life.
Rating: 2
Summary: Brilliant title, content not.
Comment: I was not as enthralled as the other reviewers.
The main articles in this book dealt with music and thermonuclear weapons.
The author is, with reason, a fervent opponent of nuclear weapons; who not? But he must admit that in the field of basic science there have never been cutbacks in the financing of research on thermonuclear weapons!
On the other hand, I agree that it is not easy to write about music. But these texts are not at the same level as, for instance, the brilliant 'Penguin Guide to Compact Discs'. I am also a big fan of Mahler. That's why I bought this book and read it.
I should however quote an important remark by the author : twentieth century science has provided us with a glimpse of something we never really knew before, the revelation of human ignorance.
Rating: 5
Summary: The poet laureate and patron saint of sane science.
Comment: As a one-time practicing physicist (now just an "arm-chair physicist") and lifetime music lover, I have found this beautifully-written little book irresistible over the 17 years it has been in my library. In 1983, when the original hardcover edition came out, this book was given to me as a gift by someone knowing my musical tastes, figuring that it would be the perfect gift. It turned out to be, but for reasons that are largely non-musical.
As an arm-chair scientist, I've read and enjoyed more than a few popularizations by well-known scientists over the years. These include Richard Feynman with his wry humor in virtually everything he wrote (I number myself among those physicists who "cut their eye teeth" on the Feynman Lectures in Physics), Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Carl Sagan, and even Brian Swimme. (The Swimme of "A Walk Through Time" goes down easily, and covers much of the same ground that Thomas does, but in a quite different way; the Swimme of "The Universe is a Green Dragon" is a much harder sell for me due to its hard-pressed attempt to oversimplify.) But for sheer elegance and poetry and breadth of scope, and for essays that provoke thought on the part of the reader, none can hold a candle to Thomas.
Everyone who reads this little masterpiece will have his or her favorites. Here are a few of mine:
In "Things Unflattened by Science" (an essay on unaddressed and/or incomplete challenges that future scientists might well undertake), a paragraph on how biologists might endeavor to better understand what music is, and how it affects the human condition, starting with a rather small-scale assignment to explain the effect of Bach's "The Art of Fugue" on the human mind.
In "Altruism" (an essay on the symbiotic interrelationships among species), how it is that such a condition actually exists, and a challenge to future scientists to better understand how our own species might become more altruistic (and adult) than it presently is.
In "The Attic of the Brain" (a cautionary essay on the risks of psychiatry, most importantly psychoanalysis, in terms of performing "total brain dumps"), the need for all of us to carry around a little clutter in our lives, as insurance against the chance that we might inadvertently lose our ability to retrieve something truly important.
In the title (and final) essay, another cautionary tale, this time on thermonuclear weaponry, the most lucid description I've ever read regarding the true meaning of this music as envisioned by Gustav Mahler. In a few brief but sublime paragraphs, Thomas has captured the essence of this remarkable opus in a way that no musician (and that includes such Mahlerites as Bernstein, Karajan, Klemperer, Rattle and Walter) ever had. Until very recently, that is, with the release a few months back of a staggering performance by Benjamin Zander, conductng the Philharmonia Orchestra. But that is another topic, and another review.
In the seventeen years since the initial publication of this book, quite a bit has changed in our worldview, in some aspects of society and science. But not enough! The observations and challenges that Thomas lays out will endure for centuries, provided only that we endure as well.
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Title: The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas ISBN: 0140243194 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas ISBN: 0140047433 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher by Lewis Thomas ISBN: 0140243275 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Et Cetera, Et Cetera: Notes of a Word-Watcher by Lewis Thomas ISBN: 1566491665 Publisher: Welcome Rain Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Fragile Species by Lewis Thomas ISBN: 0684843021 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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