Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony [Paperback]

Lewis Thomas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1995

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 of 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 t 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.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140243283
• ISBN-13: 978-0140243284
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,757 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The poet laureate and patron saint of sane science., March 14, 2000

By 

Bob Zeidler (Charlton, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (Paperback)

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.

Bob Zeidler

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Provocative Essays and Social Comment on Science and Humanities, May 4, 2007

By 

Michael Wischmeyer (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (Paperback)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Essays on humankind's accomplishments--and its dementia, February 17, 2007

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (Paperback)

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.