Customer Reviews

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

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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

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.

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.

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.

The essays collected in "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony" should probably by on the mandatory reading list in college (regardless of the major).

The author, Lewis Thomas, was a very successful physician scientist. He was not only a great scientist, but also an accomplished writer and an advisor in the President Carter's Science Advisory Committee. He writes clearly and to the point about matters of science, humanity and politics, expressing his concerns, sharing his thoughts based on substantial knowledge of the topics at hand. Not surprisingly, all the subjects turn out to be connected: scientific research impacts the decisions of the politicians and the everyday life of people all over the world.

The book was first published in 1983, when the end of the Cold War was not yet in sight. In many of the essays Thomas writes about the dangers of developing nuclear weaponry and the fears connected with its potential use, appealing to the conscience of the readers (invoking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a book "The Unforgettable Fire"). The threat was real then. Is it any less real now? I think none of the essays in this volume has aged. The countries arming themselves may be different and the powers have shifted, but the fact that we are capable of the annihilation of our own species, due to directing our achievements in science and technology towards the wrong goal, remains true.

Luckily, Thomas writes also about the positive aspects of scientific discoveries (for example, artificial organs - much has been done about it since, and he predicted many developments correctly) and about the undiscovered, interesting phenomena, which deserve attention (behavioral science, basic biological questions). Additionally, he devotes some essays to the problems of special interest to scientists: funding (government grants vs. private investments), scientific integrity, and connection between "hard" science and humanities.

"Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony" is a thought-provoking, poignant collection of essays. It is a book one should come back to time and time again, as I will definitely do.

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.

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. '

Rarely has an author captured both the folly and innate genuis of the human species so perfectly as has Lewis Thomas in this beautifully written book. Highly recommended.

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.