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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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