My Book Reviews

In this post, I am reviewing Rutger Christiaan Bregman ’s recent book Humankind: A Hopeful History ( Bloomsbury, London, 2020 ) Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and author whose name I had never heard before I picked up this well-researched positive perspective on human history.  He has been described by The Guardian as the "Dutch wunderkind of new ideas" and by TED Talks as "one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers.” Indeed, he is very young in my book, being a mere 37 years of age as this year draws to a close.  As an international bestseller, the cover of my paperback edition and several pages in the front matter are covered with encomiums to the author’s brilliance and to the wisdom contained within.  Stephen Fry ’s appraisal of this book, like the other thirty pithy and eulogising promotional quotations, sings the praises of the positivity of this history as a possible and probable renewal of our faith in “the innate goodness and natural decency of ...

Long before the discovery of penicillin by the Scottish medical doctor and microbiologist, Sir Alexander Fleming , many thousands of people died from Tuberculosis .   I mention this disease here as two of my favourite literati, separated in time by just 40 years, died all too young from this highly infectious disease. I speak of the famous Romantic poet, John Keats , who died at the young age of a mere 25 years, and the world-renowned playwright and short-story writer, Anton Chekhov , who died at 44 years of age.  Keats died in Rome in February 1821, while Chekov was born in Russia in 1860.  As an amateur philosopher, an erstwhile psychotherapist and an ageing human being, the “ultimate concern” ( Irvin Yalom ) or “boundary situation” ( Karl Jaspers ) of dying and death features highly in my consciousness.  Both of these great literary figures studied medicine, and both knew that their time on earth was limited once they began coughing up blood.  Chekhov ...

I have always been inspired by Albert Einstein ’s famous quotation: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” For Einstein, clarity in communication isn't about dumbing down ideas but demonstrating one’s mastery by distilling complexity into accessible language, showing deep comprehension rather than confusion or reliance on jargon.   I have always believed, as a teacher of some forty years' standing, that communication was at least as important as the content I was trying to convey.   I remember well one mathematics professor I had at college, who always left me perplexed after every lecture, and who consequently led me to believe I could never get my head around his specific area.   However, I had another extremely clever lecturer, whose area was equally as complex, explaining his particular speciality in mathematical language that I could get my head around.   I remember discussing this mystery in communication with a friend who was...

It is hard to avoid our past, fortunately or unfortunately, because the self is made up of its cumulative experiences and memories.   Without our memories of past experiences, we are hardly ourselves at all. That lesson was powerfully driven home to me when my late mother underwent the onset of dementia when she was 81 years of age, my two brothers and I witnessed the gradual wiping clean of her memory and personality over some fifteen years following – a painful and most dispiriting long goodbye indeed, a gradual diminution of self or personality or identity into nothingness. There are many memories I find hard to dismiss from my mind, especially those associated with growing up poor in an Ireland deeply rooted in the Catholic values of the 1960s.  The Latin Mass had given way to Vatican II ’s vernacular liturgy.  I can just about remember the Latin Mass, the priest with his back to the people and prayers and incense rising to the highest heaven and to the City of God...

In this post, I would like to review three related books Out of Wonder: The Evolving Story of the Universe by Nellie McLaughlan (Veritas, Dublin, 2016), Cosmos: The Story of Cosmic Evolution, Science and Civilisation by Carl Sagan (Abacus, 2009, originally MacDonald, 1981) and Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe, Ian Steward , Profile Books, 2016. These three books ascend in difficulty like three steps on a ladder; the first written from a spiritual/philosophical/wonderment/mystical view of the universe; the second, by far the oldest of the three works tells the fascinating story of cosmic evolution from the point of view of a professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences; while the last is by a mathematician of international renown. The Mind-blowing Magnitude of Space The French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) averred famously in his book Pensées (published posthumously in 1670) that contemplating humanity's place in the universe, dwarfed as...