Penetrating observations and speculations for scientifically inclined readers.
The renowned neuroscientist delivers a short but definitely not superficial investigation of consciousness, widely but wrongly looked on as mysterious.
Damasio—the chair of neuroscience and professor of psychology, neurology, and philosophy at USC, where he heads the Brain and Creativity Institute—emphasizes that he has no patience with efforts to solve the “hard problem”—i.e., explaining how the mass of neurons in the physical brain generates conscious mental states. His reason: They don’t, at least not by themselves. While the brain plays an indispensable role, it requires input from “non-neural tissues of the organism’s body proper.” At the simplest level, our physical senses provide feelings, and our memory provides context that our sense of self integrates into what we experience as consciousness, which the author defines as “a particular state of mind resulting from a biological process toward which multiple mental events make a contribution,” Feelings, writes Damasio, “provide the mind with facts on the basis of which we know, effortlessly, that whatever else is in the mind, at the moment, also belongs to us. Feelings allow us to experience and become conscious. Homeostatic feelings are the first enablers of consciousness.” Refreshingly for a professor of neuroscience, Damasio writes lucid prose clearly addressed to a popular audience. Even better, the book is concise (180 pages of main text plus notes and references) and helpfully divided into dozens of short chapters—e.g., “The Embarrassment of Viruses,” “Nervous Systems as Afterthoughts of Nature,” “Turning Neural Activity Into Movement and Mind,” “Algorithms in the Kitchen”—many only one or two pages. Make no mistake, however; Damasio is a deep thinker familiar with multiple disciplines, and this is as much a work of philosophy as hard science. Readers familiar with college level psychology and neuroscience will discover rewarding insights, many of which the author covered in his last book, The Strange Order of Things (2018).
Penetrating observations and speculations for scientifically inclined readers.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4755-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A nimble study that sheds new light on Marx’s thought and enduring influence.
Cultural and intellectual history of Marx’s engagements with the U.S., and the following he found.
Karl Marx, historian Hartman writes, was fascinated by the U.S. as “the nation most committed to the economic and social systems formed by capitalism.” He had fleeting hope that his concept of freedom as encompassing economic independence would find a home in the U.S., even as Abraham Lincoln—who, casual readers might not know, was the subject of much of Marx’s work as a journalist writing for Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune—also hoped that “workers might break free of capital and work for themselves.” The alignment had enough points of difference, of course, to separate Lincoln’s Republicanism from Marx’s socialism and communism. Marx supported the Union and Lincoln in particular during the Civil War, if for nuanced reasons: He was adamantly opposed to slavery, “a product of his firm belief that abolition was an essential step toward working-class emancipation.” That is, slavery and wage slavery were not so far apart. Marx’s optimism faded as Andrew Johnson, whom he called “excessively vacillating and weak,” undid the higher goals of abolitionism during Reconstruction. Hartman goes on to examine how thinkers such as C.L.R. James and political figures such as Franklin Roosevelt interpreted Marx’s thought in later years, the former in his radical history of the Haitian war of independence, the latter in shaping some of the planks of the New Deal—for, as Roosevelt said, “There is no question in my mind…that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation.” With the recent rise of populism and nationalism, Hartman concludes at the end of his era-by-era survey, it might be time again. As he writes, echoing Marx, “What do we have to lose?”
A nimble study that sheds new light on Marx’s thought and enduring influence.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9780226537481
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Ram Dass lived a full life and then some. His final statement is thorough and, yes, enlightening.
A comprehensive memoir from a famous but humble spiritual seeker.
Mention the name Ram Dass (1931-2019), and you’re likely to hear three words: Be Here Now. However, there’s much more to the man born Richard Alpert than his best-known book, as this posthumous memoir, co-written with Das, makes amply clear. Born just outside of Boston to an ambitious Jewish family, he quickly became a hungry spiritual seeker. He ran with fellow Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary, and together they became pioneers in hallucinogenic research. As he explains, psilocybin and LSD, which were legal when he began his studies, were a means of exploring other planes of consciousness, a rationale that didn’t keep him from getting fired for turning on an undergraduate student. One can imagine such a book by another author—say, Leary—as full of chest-puffing and war stories. Thankfully, on his road to enlightenment, Ram Dass also accumulated a good deal of humility. This comes across clearest in the sections that find him in India, where he became a disciple of the Hindu guru Maharaj-ji, who taught the young American pilgrim how to love and worship without using drugs—and gave him his new name, which means “servant of God.” “Turning toward Eastern spirituality was not just my inner evolution but part of a major cultural shift,” writes the author, who proves to be a steady guide to some heady events and trends, including the Harvard psychedelic tests, the communal living experiment in Millbrook, New York, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, and the influx of Westerners flooding India in search of a higher state of being. Familiar names walk in, walk out, and often return: Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and the members of the Grateful Dead.
Ram Dass lived a full life and then some. His final statement is thorough and, yes, enlightening.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68364-628-0
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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