Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony
This magnificent collection of essays by scientist and National Book Award-winning writer Lewis Thomas remains startlingly relevant for today’s world. Luminous, witty, and provocative, the essays address such topics as “The Attic of the Brain,” “Falsity and Failure,” “Altruism,” and the effects the federal government’s virtual abandonment of support for basic scientific research will have on medicine and science.

Profoundly and powerfully, Thomas questions the folly of nuclear weaponry, showing that the brainpower and money spent on this endeavor are needed much more urgently for the basic science we have abandoned—and that even medicine’s most advanced procedures would be useless or insufficient in the face of the smallest nuclear detonation. And in the title essay, he addresses himself with terrifying poignancy to the question of what it is like to be young in the nuclear age.

“If Wordsworth had gone to medical school, he might have produced something very like the essays of Lewis Thomas.”—TIME

“No one better exemplifies what modern medicine can be than Lewis Thomas.”—The New York Times Book Review
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Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony
This magnificent collection of essays by scientist and National Book Award-winning writer Lewis Thomas remains startlingly relevant for today’s world. Luminous, witty, and provocative, the essays address such topics as “The Attic of the Brain,” “Falsity and Failure,” “Altruism,” and the effects the federal government’s virtual abandonment of support for basic scientific research will have on medicine and science.

Profoundly and powerfully, Thomas questions the folly of nuclear weaponry, showing that the brainpower and money spent on this endeavor are needed much more urgently for the basic science we have abandoned—and that even medicine’s most advanced procedures would be useless or insufficient in the face of the smallest nuclear detonation. And in the title essay, he addresses himself with terrifying poignancy to the question of what it is like to be young in the nuclear age.

“If Wordsworth had gone to medical school, he might have produced something very like the essays of Lewis Thomas.”—TIME

“No one better exemplifies what modern medicine can be than Lewis Thomas.”—The New York Times Book Review
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Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

by Lewis Thomas
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

by Lewis Thomas

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Overview

This magnificent collection of essays by scientist and National Book Award-winning writer Lewis Thomas remains startlingly relevant for today’s world. Luminous, witty, and provocative, the essays address such topics as “The Attic of the Brain,” “Falsity and Failure,” “Altruism,” and the effects the federal government’s virtual abandonment of support for basic scientific research will have on medicine and science.

Profoundly and powerfully, Thomas questions the folly of nuclear weaponry, showing that the brainpower and money spent on this endeavor are needed much more urgently for the basic science we have abandoned—and that even medicine’s most advanced procedures would be useless or insufficient in the face of the smallest nuclear detonation. And in the title essay, he addresses himself with terrifying poignancy to the question of what it is like to be young in the nuclear age.

“If Wordsworth had gone to medical school, he might have produced something very like the essays of Lewis Thomas.”—TIME

“No one better exemplifies what modern medicine can be than Lewis Thomas.”—The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781101667040
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 05/01/1995
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 176
File size: 527 KB

About the Author

Lewis Thomas was a physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, he was the dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine, and the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute. He wrote regularly in the New England Journal of Medicine, and his essays were published in several collections, including The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, which won two National Book Awards and a Christopher Award, and The Medusa and the Snail, which won the National Book Award in Science. He died in 1993.

Table of Contents

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony - Lewis Thomas The Unforgettable Fire
The Corner of the Eye
Making Science Work
Alchemy
Clever Animals
On Smell
My Magical Metronome
On Speaking of Speaking
Seven Wonders
The Artificial Heart
Things Unflattened by Science
Basic Science and the Pentagon
Science and "Science"
On the Need for Asylums
Altruism
Falsity and Failure
On Medicine and the Bomb
The Problem of Dementia
The Lie Detector
Some Scientific Advie
The Attic of the Brain
Humanities and Science
On Matters of Doubt
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony
Notes
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