by Site Owner | May 12, 2012 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Science & Technology
By David Eagleman Pantheon, $26.95, 290 pages How culpable are we for our actions? In this impressive, spacious book, Eagleman makes a bold claim: not very. Here is his rather uncontroversial main point: “You are not consciously aware of the vast majority of your...
by Site Owner | Apr 5, 2012 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Current Events & Politics
By Lawrence Weschler Counterpoint, $26.00, 306 pages Notice the subtitle: adventures in “the” narrative. Not “a” narrative or even just “narrative.” For author Lawrence Weschler, we can conclude, form matters. His new book cobbles together recent examples of this...
by Site Owner | Apr 4, 2012 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Current Events & Politics
By James Livingston Basic Books, $27.95, 242 pages Livingston, an academic with a bent for sharp argumentation, diagnoses the current economic crisis as a product of “superfluous profit”. A massive shift of wealth away from labor and into corporate returns has fueled...
by Site Owner | Apr 2, 2012 | Nature, Outdoors & Animals
By Robert Trivers Basic Books, $28.00, 397 pages A professor of biology, Trivers explains not just how effectively, efficiently and effortlessly we self-deceive, but how we are evolutionarily primed to do so. In his telling, success – whether financial or...
by Site Owner | Feb 1, 2012 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Science & Technology
by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw Da Capo Press, $25.00, 256 pages Quantum physics arose as a mathematical tool to make predictions about a realm, the sub-atomic, that did not seem to make sense from the truths of normal science. When Cox and Forshaw, professors of...