Criticalcompendium
Book Reviews

“What philosophers (have not done), until recently, is take an interest in empirical research about our responses to these or other dilemmas. Now, as philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah describes in his concise yet erudite and engagingly written new book, “Experiments in Ethics,” this is changing.” Read the review at the New York Sun.

“In his latest book, “Head and Heart,” Garry Wills surveys the fault lines in U.S. Christianity and argues that the real fracture is between “Enlightened” religion (of the head) and “Evangelical” religion (of the heart). Throughout American history, he writes, Christians have oscillated between these “two poles of religious attraction.” Wills is a liberal Catholic [...]

“In November 2006 a publishing house in Moscow issued the first three volumes of the collected works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The remaining volumes will be released through 2010, and the 30-volume set will be the first full collection of Solzhenitsyn’s works to be published and sold in Russia. “The Solzhenitsyn Reader” is a noteworthy publishing [...]

“Kirsch wrote these 27 pieces for magazine publication, and most are good and short (but sometimes, as with his piece on Philip Larkin, the word limit crimps him, making one wonder why he didn’t expand and extend particular essays for the book). He illuminates one postwar living or dead poet after another, from Derek Walcott [...]

“As a sequel to his enormously successful 1901 essay, “The Life of the Bee,” which sold an astonishing 250,000 copies, (Maurice) Maeterlinck’s 1907 essay “The Intelligence of Flowers” (nicely translated here from the French by Philip Mosley) melds religious intuition and scientific observation. He describes numerous examples of intelligence in flowers as they seek to [...]

“The author of “God Is Not Great” seems to have won the battle for World’s Best Atheist (sorry, Richard Dawkins), and here has collected a far-reaching range of likeminded nonbelievers.’ Read the review at Time Out Chicago.

William Maxwell called memory “a form of storytelling … in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw”. John Stuart Mill thought it “the present consciousness of a past sensation”. The science contributors to this anthology locate the various functions of memory in different areas of the brain. Whatever it may be, [...]

“Muzaffar Iqbal, who is a well-known scientist and Islamic scholar based in Canada, has written a book about science and Islam that is weighted towards the Middle Ages and has nothing to say about camel breeding or falconry. He has an agreeably caustic and aggressive approach to outdated and erroneous ideas about the history of [...]

“As Searle disarmingly explains in his introduction to Freedom and Neurobiology, he produced this latest volume by accident. In 2001, he gave two lectures at the Sorbonne and agreed to their publication in French translation, thinking that they would in due course appear in some little-read journal. He was pleasantly surprised when some time later [...]

“A few years ago a psychologist and a philosopher got into an argument over whether we can accurately describe our thoughts. “Yes,” said the psychologist; with training and the help of my special technique, we can accurately describe our thoughts. The philosopher doubted it. To resolve their argument, they recruited a young woman who agreed [...]

Easily the question most often asked of us on this job is, “Yeah, but do you read the whole book?” The answer, of course, is yes, we do. And are we ever glad that’s our policy, because if we’d given up on Chuck Thompson’s collection of travel essays, this would have been a much different [...]

“When wandering through the Botswanian wilderness, you could ask for no better ally than Peter Allison. An experienced safari guide with a genuine love for the country and its animals, Allison’s debut, Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide recounts his experiences.” Read the review at Bookslut.