Criticalcompendium
Book Reviews

“We’ve all run into people whose endearing charms camouflage a Machiavellian core. Even after we have been burned repeatedly, our good nature persuades us to give them the benefit of the doubt. They are, writes author Barbara Oakley, “successfully sinister.” How do some people get that way, and what allows them to survive and often [...]

“Some fishing boats trawl weighted nets across the seabed, hauling up everything they can possibly find, dumping the odd catch onto the deck for sorting. “Perfect Figures” does something like this with number lore. Were it not for Bunny Crumpacker’s poetic asides, one might mistake this text for the output of a Web-crawling search engine.’ [...]

“Several years ago, Edward Ball took possession of an ancient family desk and discovered something in a locked compartment that to him must have seemed almost predestined. He found a collection of carefully labeled and dated locks of hair from nine of his 19th-century relatives, the oldest specimen dating from 1824 . . . . [...]

Nuclear power is back. As temperatures rise, fission is starting to look green compared with fossil fuels . . . Gwyneth Cravens, a novelist and former anti-nuclear protester, is one of the technology’s new apostles. In “Power to Save the World,” she takes a journey through America’s nuclear heartland, from the New Mexico Mining Museum, [...]

“Why do some countries have an economically helpful culture while others don’t? And, since no society got very far in economic terms before the Industrial Revolution, what caused the culture of the recently successful ones to change? In “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, suggests an [...]

“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 [...]

“In “The Head Trip,” (Jeff) Warren plunges into mundane and exotic states of mind with the verve of an intrepid travel writer. His approach is simple. Identifying about a dozen distinct modes of consciousness, from dream states to hypnosis to “the zone” that athletes wax poetic about, he endeavors to experience each one firsthand. Woven [...]

“An artificial-intelligence expert who clearly isn’t afraid of artificial whoopie, (David) Levy predicts that by the year 2050, “robots will be hugely attractive to humans as companions,” and “the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s publishing [...]

“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.

“When Herbert Wernham died, he left – surely against his better judgment – a curiously personal archive. Wernham was a botany curator in what was then, nearly 100 years ago, the natural history section of the British Museum. He was not good with money, colleagues recalled. He had greater success with women. We know this [...]

“Do not be put off by the vaunting title. J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project laboratory that developed the first atomic bomb, was not a mythical hero but a damaged and limited human being, as Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin amply demonstrate. His main problem was his prodigious brain-power, as unmistakable [...]

Brain plasticity is the topic of Norman Doidge’s new book, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. About half of the chapters describe the basic science of plasticity, profiling major discoveries from the last 50 years and the scientists responsible for those discoveries. Doidge himself is a [...]

John Allen Paulos is a mathematician who teaches at Temple University and also a talented popularizer. In previous books he has trained his mathematical eye on humor, the stock market and what he reads in the newspaper. Now he has taken on God. Paulos is not a credulous man. He sees things, he tells us, [...]

“(The) new manned spaceflight industry is now comprehensively chronicled for the first time by freelance journalist Michael Belfiore, a frequent contributor to Popular Science. Rocketeers gives a behind-the-scenes look at several of the new space companies, most of which formed in the 1990s and are only now hitting their stride, and a few of which [...]

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, [...]

“In his exhaustive and, to be quite frank, exhausting book, “Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis” (Harper, 614 pages, $29.95), George Makari gives us a blow-by-blow account of both Freud’s intellectual development and the institutional development of psychoanalysis.” Read the review at the New York Sun.

“Have you ever wondered how people develop trust and live together peacefully? Michael Shermer’s new book uses psychology and evolution to examine the root of these human achievements. He notes that the original environment in which people evolved, namely the small groups in hunter-gatherer societies, helped people develop altruism and cooperative behavior.” Read the review [...]

“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 [...]

Does the right person always get credit for a great invention? Was Thomas Edison or the Englishman Joseph Swan responsible for the light bulb? Did Al Gore or some other geek invent the Internet? Did Alexander Graham Bell steal from Elisha Gray a key idea behind the telephone? Such questions can fuel debates between historians [...]

“In his magisterial but flawed new book, “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,” (Nicholas) Carr predicts that “software as a service” is about to revolutionize the technology industry. Forget Microsoft (and, for that matter, the Mac); the personal-computing era is over. And the transformation of computing into a utility is not [...]

“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 [...]

“For the first time, Americans have the chance to meet an ancient ancestor. Lucy, the famous 3.2-million-year-old, human-like fossil from Ethiopia, is here on tour. For the next six years, you can visit her at museums across the country and stare into the mirror of your own past. But in Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin [...]

“Truth be told, (David P.) Barash’s line of inquiry, like Richard Dawkins’ or Steven Pinker’s, does result in bracing and unsettling ideas. Through the lens of evolutionary psychology, we are forced to face our ancient self, that bestial creature that knows nothing of atomic bombs or jihad, marriage or MySpace, but still haunts our body, [...]