Nelson is humble and balanced, wary of our perception of consciousness and infectiously fascinated by how the brain shapes...
Examination of the neurological foundations of out-of-body and near-death experiences, from an expert on the subject.
Nelson (Neurology/Univ. of Kentucky) has spent decades exploring what underlies spiritual experiences, so there is more to this book than physiological probing. In particular, the author is sensitive to the intensity of a transcendent moment, how it “deeply moves us or transports us and connects us in one way or another with something larger than ourselves.” As a neurologist, however, he seeks an explanation based on well-established brain mechanisms. Nelson builds the explanation slowly, presenting current thinking behind consciousness and self (“mysterious and elusive, hotly debated and now awesomely arcane”); introducing appropriate anecdotal material to illustrate a variety of spiritual encounters and milieus; and taking lay readers into the brain’s architecture. The author is especially interested in the borderland created when “[p]art of the dreaming brain erupts in a brain already awake,” blending REM dream states with waking consciousness and provoking hallmarks of the near-death or spiritual experiences, such as the tunnel, the blinding light, life review and bliss. Each of these experiences is known to have a physiological basis, and they conspicuously overlap in that fuzzy space where the REM features of visual activation, paralysis and the dream narrative, among others, intrude into the waking state. Of course, this does not touch upon other varieties of spiritual experience—especially, Nelson notes, mystical oneness—but it draws attention to the correspondences between common features of spiritual experiences and the mind. And not just the mind—“through its nerves the heart can cause REM consciousness in waking times.” Blood supply is the major player in near-death experiences, writes the author, but also, “spiritual experiences should be judged by the profundity of their effect on us—not by what causes them.”
Nelson is humble and balanced, wary of our perception of consciousness and infectiously fascinated by how the brain shapes it.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-525-95188-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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