by Tim Parks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 22, 2019
A lucid exploration of thinking, perceiving, and being human.
What accounts for our experience of reality?
British novelist and nonfiction writer Parks (In Extremis, 2017, etc.) turns his attention from Italy, the cherished landscape he has evoked in several previous books, to Heidelberg, Germany, where he journeys into the dazzling, mysterious landscape of the mind. The author went to Heidelberg to participate in an interdisciplinary project focused “on the business of being conscious,” and he was guided by an overarching question: “do the models, the explanations, whatever that we have of consciousness, the version of events that our various authorities sign up to, make sense?” Parks recounts with generous and eager openness his conversations with leading philosophers and neuroscientists from whom he gleaned three positions about consciousness, defined “simply as the feeling that accompanies our being alive, aware of perceptive experience.” The most prevalent view holds that consciousness is produced in the brain by physical and chemical processes; a minority view, known as “enactivist,” holds that consciousness emerges from interaction with the world, requiring “both subject and object to happen”; and a smaller minority puts forth the Spread Mind view, “in which experience is made possible by the meeting of perceptive system and the world” and “located at the object perceived.” Since the proponent of the Spread Mind view is the author’s friend and confidant, he tries mightily to give credence to a perspective that he finds intuitively difficult to accept. Parks is fascinated by the work of neuroscientists but frustrated by the notion “that all our experience is internal to the brain and everything that we are is essentially a matter of what goes on in those three pounds of grey jelly.” In brain studies, he adds, there is a “gap between facts and storyline,” between “the nitty gritty” of scientific findings and speculation about “what these findings mean.” In the end, the author advises readers to test scientific theories against their own lived experience. “When it comes to consciousness,” he asserts, “we are all repositories of quantities of evidence far richer than any available in the neuroscientist’s laboratory.”
A lucid exploration of thinking, perceiving, and being human.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68137-397-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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