Historia Economica Mundial: Desde El Medioevo Hasta Los Tiempos Contemporaneos (Ariel Sociedad Economica)

Book Description

A major new memoir by the man who argued Brown v. Board.

As chief legal assistant to Thurgood Marshall and, later, as General Counsel to the NAACP, Robert L. Carter played a central role in crafting the legal strategy for the pivotal cases of the civil rights era —arguing and winning over twenty pivotal cases before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board, with Thurgood Marshall. A Matter of Law is the extraordinary story of Carter's struggle for equal rights for all Americans.

Carter's history with the NAACP during its pivotal years (1945-1968) is at the center of this memoir, which offers a rare personal account of how the legal campaign in Brown was mounted. In the aftermath of Brown, Carter turned his attention to broadening the application of Brown to challenge racial inequality in Northern schools. His account of the NAACP's efforts to expose the pervasive nature of school segregation in the North brings this history to the forefront for the first time —and is essential to any discussion of the limitations of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Carter's post-NAACP career enabled him to participate in and reflect on the fight for racial justice from a variety of vantage points, most recently as a federal district judge in New York. He brings a fresh and critical perspective to bear on the long-term consequences of the civil rights movement and the need for new and innovative approaches to the continuing struggle for racial justice in America.

Customer Reviews:

how the civil rights battles were thought.......2005-10-14

Judge Robert Carter gives a blow by blow account of the legal fronts of the civil rights struggle: the personalities involved, the infighting among them, the battles won, lost, and nearly neglected. Brown v. Board is well-told elsewhere, while other struggles receive overdue attention (e.g., the battle for the NAACP to preserve its member lists from scrutiny by officials striving to break the organization's back).

Carter perceives himself as the uncharismatic technocrat of the struggle, an unheralded leader in a fight who was unceremoniously jettisoned from its core despite his impressive contributions.
Accordingly, his account is that of a dutiful documentarian, rather than a labor of love, and the writing suffers for a dearth of passion.

A brief memoir.......2005-09-27

When reading about the history of the NAACP's and the Legal Defense Fund's struggle for human rights, we tend to hear more about Thurgood Marshall and not enough about Robert Carter, who was a integral part of the fight. After many years, Robert Carter has shared his perspective with us.

Tales from Carter's childhood and schooling are simply stated. Given the discrimination and hardship with which he grew up, these tales are more aptly labeled, "simply understated. His accomplishments through adversity are clearly laudable, but we don't get all the detail we would hope for. He does discuss a falling out between Marshall and him, and he also discusses grabs for power as Thurgood left. However, we don't get this level of detail on the cases.

Regardless of the level of detail, this is a very informative read. I would recommend that anyone wanting to know more about our continuing struggle with civil rights should read this book.

A Matter of Law: A Memoir of Struggle in Cause of Equal Rights.(Book Review) : An article from: Black Issues Book Review

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A Matter of Law: A Memoir of Struggle in Cause of Equal Rights.(Book Review) : An article from: Black Issues Book Review
C. Gerald Fraser
Manufacturer: Cox, Matthews & Associates
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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This digital document is an article from Black Issues Book Review, published by Cox, Matthews & Associates on September 1, 2005. The length of the article is 467 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: A Matter of Law: A Memoir of Struggle in Cause of Equal Rights.(Book Review)
Author: C. Gerald Fraser
Publication: Black Issues Book Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 2005
Publisher: Cox, Matthews & Associates
Volume: 7 Issue: 5 Page: 51(1)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

Jointly published with INRA, Paris.

Pesticide resistance is becoming more frequent and widespread with more than 500 insect species known to have become resistant to synthetic insecticides. On the other hand, consumers increasingly demand agricultural products without any pesticide residues. This book, for the first time, shows the alternative: solely physical methods for plant protection by means of thermal, electromagnetic, mechanical and vacuum processes. A glossary rounds up this extremely valuable book.

Book Description

The first part of the book is an in-depth review into the events which lead to the production of functioning T cells. The second part of the book includes a close and detailed look at thymocyte differentiation and thymic microenvironment in the fetal rat thymus.

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What are little physicists made of? Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam, in John Wheeler's science autobiography. To the rest of us, getting excited over the properties of atomic nuclei and the forces that hold invisible particles together may seem eccentric, to say the least. But physicists hold the secrets of the universe in their heads, and they have a special place in human history. Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Oppenheimer--their names are inextricably linked with the mysteries of the atom. Wheeler, among the most creative physicists of our time, tackled questions related to the nature of space, time, and gravity alongside his more well known colleagues. Renowned as a teacher, Wheeler worked with student Richard Feynman to imagine a subatomic world where particles move backward in time. With fellow physicist and former student Ken Ford, Wheeler has crafted an engaging look at the eye of the 20th-century physics hurricane. There's a lot of physics in this book, which may put off those shy of its terminology and abstractions, but the stories and photographs of the men and women who know the atom will help readers see the humanity in science, and the warmth and passion of its practitioners. This is a remarkable history of one man's part in revealing the underlying nature of everything. --Therese Littleton

Book Description

He studied with Niels Bohr, taught Richard Feynman, and boned up on relativity with his friend and colleague Albert Einstein. John Archibald Wheeler's fascinating life brings us face to face with the central characters and discoveries of modern physics. He was the first American to learn of the discovery of nuclear fission, coined the term "black hole," led a renaissance in gravitation physics, and helped to build Princeton University into a mecca for physicists. From nuclear physics to quantum theory to relativity and gravitation, Wheeler's work has set the trajectory of research for half a century. His career has brought him into contact with the most brilliant minds of his field; Fermi, Bethe, Rabi, Teller, Oppenheimer, and Wigner are among those he's called colleague and friend. In this rich autobiography, Wheeler reveals in colorful detail the excitement of each discovery, the character of each colleague, and the underlying passion for knowledge that drives him still.

Customer Reviews:

The invention of the Wheeler.......2006-09-12

Physicists often compare themselves to blind men feeling an elephant -- each guessing at the nature of the beast by describing the small part that they can touch. If true, then no man has come closer to feeling the Whole Elephant than John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler's energetic career touched virtually every significant modern physicist -- Bohr, Fermi, Einstein, Teller, Oppenheimer, Feynman and many others -- a dazzling list that includes the most luminous minds of the last century. Wheeler may have missed winning a Nobel prize only because he was willing to sacrifice the best slice of his career to secretly help develop the fission and later fusion bombs for America. After leaving what he calls the "everything is particles" phase of his career, Wheeler entered "everything is fields" -- inventing the term "black hole" and describing the properties of these amazing objects long before anybody else ever took them seriously. Some ideas such as "geons" -- self sustained loops of light held together by their own gravitational attraction -- may still await discovery. Finally, in "everything is information" he explores ways in which information theory may be the most underlying unifying principle of reality. Part biography, part history and part speculation, this rambling story portrays a uniquely American explorer on a voyage through the amazing landscape of 20th century physics. The book is packed with photographs and profiles of the world's smartest men, fascinating anecdotes and meticulous historical details -- and shows that even at the age of 87, John Wheeler can still get excited talking about the unsolved mysteries that pervade our universe.

--Auralgo

Excellent autobiography.......2004-05-05

This is really a wonderful scientific biography. Wheeler has an engaging, easy-going style that doesn't sacrifice detail and scholarly accuracy for readibility. It's almost like having a fireside chat with the great physicist about the entire history of 20th century physics. Wheeler's career spanned almost the entire 20th century and he worked in many areas, from atomic and radiation physics to nuclear physics, quantum theory, black holes and gravitation. He even made a brief foray into sociology when he attended a conference and spoke on "National Survival and Human Development," in which he emphasized the importance of a country developing the full capabilities of all citizens.

In addition to learning about his own distinguished career, you meet just about every other important physicist and/or mathematician or had anything to do with physics (such as Carson Mark, who I didn't know about before, who Wheeler spoke highly of), and his account is full of interesting personal details about famous and non-famous physicists alike. Wheeler met or knew other great scientists like Einstein, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, Hans Bethe, Oppenheimer, Stanislaw Ulam, John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, Isidore Rabi, Leo Szilard, Carl Bohm, and many others too numerous to mention.

In addition to the above famous names, I also learned something about many other names, both famous and not so famous, that I didn't know much about before, and Wheeler often briefly mentions what each scientist's contribution was about, especially when it influenced his own thinking.

Wheeler provides some important insights about himself. For example, he commented on how much of his own productivity was due to the deadlines and time pressure he was under most of his career. Many of us have the impression that brilliant minds like Wheeler (much of it fostered by the public's stereotype of Einstein) create their amazing intellectual achievements in a world divorced from reality and the mundane aspects of everyday life, but Wheeler says that it was often all the deadlines he had to meet that was responsible for much of his best work. He was always having to meet deadlines for papers, class lectures, various reports, talks he was invited to give, and so on throughout the course of his career, and he said he was often spurred to work harder because of them, and often did his best work under the pressure of having to prepare a lecture or talk at the last minute.

Overall, this is a very enjoyable, readable, and interesting biography about one of the great scientists of our time.

By the way, just a personal note here. I'm not a physicist myself (actually, I'm a neurobiologist by training), but I'm the grand-nephew of physicist Ernest Lawrence, who won the 1939 Nobel prize for his invention of the first atom smasher or cyclotron, and who Wheeler met briefly when he was considering a move from Princeton to U.C. Berkeley.

Physics aside.......2002-12-03

The physics is fine but this is an autobiography. What kind of a man is Wheeler? I got the impression he spent as much time avoiding offending anybody important as he did on physics. He sounds like an amiable sycophant.

Remarkable scientist, admirable man.......2001-02-09

Having noticed over the years that Prof. John Archibald Wheeler's name turns up in an amazing variety of physics-related articles and anecdotes, I was particularly primed to read his autobiography. The book doesn't follow a simple from-birth chronology, but rather begins with Wheeler teaching at Princeton and volunteering to meet the ship carrying his mentor, Niels Bohr, at a New York City dock in January of 1939. From that pivotal moment at the brink of World War II, Wheeler fills out his story by reaching back to childhood and forward to his long career in teaching, research, and national service. We learn of his brother Joe, whose body lay in a foxhole on an Italian hillside until it was reduced to bones. Wheeler reminds us that if the Manhattan Project had geared up one year earlier, the lives of his brother and many others might have been spared.

Wheeler's remarkable character pervades the book and helps make it unique and interesting. In a profession legendary for strong intellects and egos, he has achieved and maintained a pomposity coefficient of zero. His judgments of other people are unfailingly generous, but also astute enough to be interesting and revealing. He provides candid firsthand impressions of legendary figures such as Bohr, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller, Ulam, Heisenberg, Fermi, Szilard and Feynman . We also learn about many less well-known colleagues, friends and students whom he finds memorable for various reasons. In contrast to the eminent-scientist stereotype, Wheeler has always enjoyed teaching undergraduates and is genuinely interested in the problems and aspirations of the young people entrusted to his care.

Like the brilliant George Gamow, Wheeler has a talent for explaining difficult concepts and illustrating them with whimsically inventive diagrams. The book's autobiographical threads are interwoven with a rich tapestry of subtle but plainly-spoken physical insights on dozens of topics, some arcane enough to leave even the author slightly bemused. I believe anyone interested in physics will find a personal revelation or two among Wheeler's lucid, informal scientific explanations. There are touches of Gamowesque humor too, such as his theory that the fates somehow conspired to entangle him with a string of Hungarian emigres.

The title concepts of the book -- Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam -- were all named by Wheeler himself. He began his career at the minute scale of particle physics, moved on to the grand sweep of relativistic cosmology, and finally circled back to the hyperminuteness of quantum foam. Of course there is nothing really disjointed about such a journey, since connections among the nested scales of nature constitute one of the grand unifying themes of physics.

A wonderful book on the life of an influential physicist.......2000-02-27

During his tenure at Princeton university, John Archibald Wheeler has served as the mentor to such outstanding physicists as Richard P. Feynman, Kip Thorne and Hugh Everett. He was also great friends with such individuals as Albert Einstein & Niels Bohr. In short, his contributions to physics have been indispensable.

This present work of his traces his life, a life that is (as the cover says) one of science. However, one of the nice facets of this book is that it goes beyond just the laboratory & reveals the personal life of this great man. We learn of the moving death of his brother in WWII, his worries and concerns over nuclear war (as well as the grapples with his conscience that he endured over the invention of the hydrogen bomb) and many other aspects of his life. He also tells stories of some of his most memorable students; not all of these were necessarily his most gifted pupils. Above all, Wheeler reveals a genuine human passion that has characterized his approach to science over the greater part of this century. One of the best biographies of a scientist I have ever read.

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Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: a Life in Physics.(Review): An article from: American Scientist
Chris Impey
Manufacturer: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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ASIN: B00098MT02
Release Date: 2005-07-28

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Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics
John Archibald, and Ford, Kenneth Wheeler
Manufacturer: Norton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000TQF93I

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Fantastic adventures

A collection of short story treasures

The Collected Jorkens, Vol. 1: The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens and Jorkens Remembers Africa
Lord Dunsany
Manufacturer: Night Shade Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Collected Jorkens, Vol. 2

The Collected Jorkens Volume 3

The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 3

The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places (The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Vol. 2)

The Book of Wonder

ASIN: 189238955X

Book Description

The first in a three-volume set collecting all of Lord Dunsany's club stories, as told by Jorkens. Long unavailable, and essential reading for all fans of classic fantasy. Introduction by Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

Customer Reviews:

Fantastic adventures.......2005-03-15

Fantastic tall-tales with low-key humor told by Jorkens at the Billiards Club. The old man's remembrances of unusual adventures at the edge of the world in the 1920s and 1930s are quite amusing. They include a story about a mermaid, adventures in Africa, and trees that are alive. Jorkens recounts his adventures for club members in return for a whiskey, and the club members are never quite sure how truthful he's being. This first collection by Nightshade of three volumes includes tales originally published as The Travel Tales of Joseph Jorkens (1931) and Jorkens Remembers Africa (1934).

I love the atmosphere of these stories. Dunsany knew how to grab readers at the start:

The talk had veered round to runes and curses and witches, one bleak December evening where a few of us sat warm in easy chairs round the cheery fire of the Billiards Club. "Do you believe in witches?" one of us said to Jorkens. "It isn't what I believe in that matters so much" said Jorkens, "only what I've seen."

How can you not read further after a beginning like this? Dunsany knew how to tell good stories. I quite enjoyed this collection of stories. If you like old ghost stories or Sherlock Holmes, you may enjoy Jorkens.

A collection of short story treasures.......2004-05-19

The 18th Lord Dunsany (d 1957) was an incredibly prolific writer who delved into poetry, plays, short stories, novels, essays, whatever. His prose work is characterized by two things: clever ideas and gorgeous English. He would get an idea--perhaps, while shooting snipe or fox-hunting, and then he'd dedicate himself (and the lives of family and servants) to its realization in whatever written medium seemed appropriate. One category of stories is probably best described as "lies." He felt a bit uncomfortable with the distance some of these tales achieved from plausibility, and so he put them into the mouth of a rather disreputable member of his club: Jorkens.

Judging from the collection of stories (the writing of which spanned his entire prose career), Jorkens traveled everywhere in the world and did everything. I especially like story of the man who flew a biplane to Mars (the planets were fortuitously aligned) and what he finds there.

Night Shade is publishing the entire collection of Jorkens stories, a great boon to those of us who either haven't been able to find copies of the originals or couldn't afford these now collector items.

Book Description

Raymond Aron has won the respect and admiration of leading figures from all spheres of twentieht-centruy life and from all points of teh poilitical spectrum. An independent thinker who was often called the lone voice of reason in the heat of political conflicts, Aron became well known for his bold, penetrating ideas. His dispassionate, probing analyses of international affairs, ethnic conflicts, social and economic problems, and contemporary history have become increasingly influential in the U.S. and foreign arenas of political discourse and public policy.

Whether working with the Free French in London during World War II, voicing early support for the reconstruction of a devastated post-war Germany, or offering new insights on peace and war in a nuclear age, Aron consistently brightened areas of inquiry by his capacity for cogent and forthright reflection. In the foreground of many of the most important political events of the twentieth century, he developed relationships with others similarly engaged figures such as Charles de Gaulle, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andr Malraux, and Henry Kissinger, all of whom appear in his prizewinning Memoirs.

Aron stimulated debate and elicited strong attachments in his roles as journalist, author, adviser, and professor in philosophy, political science, and sociology in Europe and the United States, where he contributed to periodicals such as the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, COMMENTARY, and FOREIGN AFFAIRS. Since his death in 1983, Aron's brilliant works of social and political philosophy have found an increasingly large following among younger readers whose appreciation can only deepen with this behind-the-scenes glimpse of the man and his thoughts.

Customer Reviews:

one of the least known great thinkers.......2001-04-23

Raymond Aron was unique among intellectuals: at once a journalist and scholar, he was a prolific writer on, and noted expert in, a huge aray of subjects from philosophy to military strategy to economics. As it turns out, his life was also fascinating: he was a classmate and best friends with Sartre before becoming his great adversary during the post war debates on Marxism, was in London for the French resistance during the war, and became a television personality late in life.

In French, Aron writes with a grace and clarity that are astonishing. Now I have finally read his memoires, one of the last things he wrote. When you compare any contemporary intellectual to him, they simply can't measure up.

Patient but not condescending, honest, and breath-taking.......1999-06-21

Simply put, Rayomd Aron's memoir is proufound and interesting. Those who want to affect society in terms of knowledge should read this book. Aron just before his death tells us what intellectual ethics is, how unconscious intellectuals can be far from mass, and why we need philosohpy to understand society. Through the entire of the book, there is a specter of Sartre who used to be Aron's "little comarade" but turned out to be his ideological enemy. In contrast to a Sartre's monstrous genius who declined a Nobel prize, Aron commits himself as a humble humanutarian. This book is a critical review of the French intellectual history.

a wonderful book.......1998-09-22

Raymond Aron is one of the most interesting intellectuals of this century. His writing is deeply appealing. He is not just telling the political history of the century he lived. The pages are like a wave that drifts from the right to the left inside the parties, from his childhood to poetry, passing through comunism, nazism, the wars, the fall of the ideologies, till reach the decade where the giant (USA) starts its fall - the seventies. He throws you into the political sense, into the racionality of the inteligentsias throughout Europe. It's not just about past, present and future. It's a different history. It's a guest for reason, it's a guest for the most challinging steps of man.

Customer Reviews:

Concise but thorough, a worthwhile read........2000-05-25

Montesquieu's "Considerations..." is a refreshing change of pace from the usual, long winded, dry books on Roman history. It is a concise, clear, chronologically presented work, but still manages to be quite thorough in examining a variety of the causes behind the rise and fall of the Romans. The author touches on the social, military, economic and moral factors that made the Romans great, and in the end led to collapse of their empire. I can recommend it as a worthwhile read to those of you interested in the history of the Romans.

A Succinct and Readable analysis of Roman History.......2000-05-07

A book far too often ignored by modern readers. Montesquieu presents a succinct and readable analysis of the history of the Roman Republic and Empire. For both the layperson and the scholar interested in Roman History this is an essential read. He presents the reasons for the the spread of Rome's empire, the fall of the Republic, and the long duration and eventual collapse of the empire in a clear fashion. He goes through Roman history chronologically and shows how these causes relate to specific events. Edward Gibbon praises Montesquieu in his memoirs, and after reading his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it is easy to see how the theses presented here on religion and the military may have influenced Gibbon's own conclusions.

Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline

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Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline
with Notes and an Introduction By David Lowenthal Montesquieu : Translated
Manufacturer: Free Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OTN6XK

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Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline
Baron De; Lowenthal, David (translator) Montesquieu
Manufacturer: Free Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0000CMXCD

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Considerations On the Causes Of The Greatness Of The Romans And Their Decline

Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000G1MWUY

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What are the limits of self-knowledge? Acclaimed science writer John Horgan takes a penetrating look into the world of neuroscience in The Undiscovered Mind, a follow-up to his more general The End of Science. Already pessimistic about the long-term prospects for the grand endeavor of scientific progress, he finds even more reason for skepticism about the claims of those who study the brain and the mind. Will we ever cross the explanatory gap between our reductionist neuroanatomical knowledge and our everyday awareness of the qualities of our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings? Horgan's answer is no.

He's no neo-Luddite, though--his aim is not to disillusion the public, not to reduce funding, but to address the hubris of the neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, and artificial-intelligence researchers who all proclaim a new golden age just around the corner thanks to an imminent grand unified theory of consciousness, a theory Horgan believes unlikely and far off at best. His clear, entertaining prose is more conversational than polemic, and his verbal portraits of luminaries such as Eric Kandel and Lewis Wolpert make for engrossing, thoughtful reading. Even if you disagree with him, as many neuroscientists do, his point of view is refreshing and challenging, and hence well worth consideration. --Rob Lightner

Book Description

GRAY MATTER UNDER INVESTIGATION

In his acclaimed book The End of Science, John Horgan ignited a firestorm of controversy about the limits of knowledge in a wide range of sciences. Now in The Undiscovered Mind he focuses on the single most important scientific enterprise of all -- the effort to understand the human mind.

Horgan takes us inside laboratories, hospitals, and universities to meet neuro-scientists, Freudian analysts, electroshock therapists, behavioral geneticists, evolutionary psychologists, artificial intelligence engineers, and philosophers of consciousness. He looks into the persistent explanatory gap between mind and body that Socrates pondered and shows that it has not been bridged. He investigates what he calls the "Humpty Dumpty dilemma," the fact that neuroscientists can break the brain and mind into pieces but cannot put the pieces back together again. He presents evidence that the placebo effect is the primary ingredient of psychotherapy, Prozac, and other treatments for mental disorders. As Horgan shows, the mystery of human consciousness, of why and how we think, remains so impregnable that to expect the attempts of scientific method and technology to penetrate it anytime soon is absurd.

Customer Reviews:

'Swift-Boating' neuroscience.......2006-02-03

It's healthy bear in mind, as Horgan urges, that neuroscience has yet to produce medical or technological breakthroughs on the scale of physics, chemistry, or other areas of biology (of which neuroscience is a subfield, btw); research programs in the field would do well to be more influenced by these priorities. But as far as his grander, negative conclusions regarding the futility of neuroscience are concerned, the book is an unmitigated failure. Indeed, the discussion of neuroscience is so thin and his arguments so specious that one suspects that Horgan is really quite content just to provide a set of Tom Cruise-style talking points for those who are already suspicious (or frightened) of the empirical study of mind.

Horgan's negative claims are not borne out by an honest look at the field. For example, he professes not to be able to come up with a single solid discovery that neuroscience has made in its history. Really? What about the discovery of receptive fields by Kuffler and others, a fundamental fact about sensory and motor neural organization every student learns? How about functional neural columns in V1 (Hubel & Wiesel) and elsewhere? The neural correlate of eye movement commands in the superior colliculus (Wurtz, Goldberg et al.)? And what exactly was the objection to Kandel's groundbreaking work on the molecular basis of memory supposed to be?

Rather, Horgan's methodology is to exploit the modesty and self-effacement of many neuroscientists, who will say `But of course we have no idea how X works' to temper the enthusiasm surrounding their discovery of Y. But modesty (or jadedness) notwithstanding, no neuroscientist believes that the field has learned nothing important about the brain in the last 100 years, or that important questions haven't been answered definitively. Horgan also offers a sort of argument from ignorance-if he and his colleagues at Scientific American can't get their heads around Goldman-Rakic's work in an afternoon, it must be beyond human comprehension altogether. Other interpretations of the situation are possible.

In sum, a grossly misleading book.

a high level survey of mind science.......2005-06-01

I found Horgan's book valuable as a survey of the highly varied fields relating to the science, engineering, and philosophy of the mind. Although the theories are immature and contradictory, Horgan maintains a tone of hopeful skepticism.

For me, the most valuable feature of the book was its high level perspective, helping me to see, for example, that much of psychotherapy and psychiatry is quack medicine, and to learn about the ideas of evolutionary psychology. But don't expect to learn much detail from this book; it contains no diagrams and keeps on moving at a fast pace.

If, like me, you have only passing familiarity with Freud's ideas, you will be interested to read Horgan's critique of the theories of oedipal complexes, childhood trauma as an explanation of adult behavior, anal personalities, and Freudian slips. He condemns Freud as the father of false memory syndrome. Horgan regards Freud as a great storyteller, but a highly flawed scientist. He relates studies showing that psychotherapy succeeds, when it does, because of a placebo effect, that actuarial methods are better predictors of future behavior than the clinical methods of psychology, and that in one study, patients who received more therapy had higher crime rates!

His critique of psychiatry is equally harsh: the field has a long history of quack fads, often inhumane, and poor quality control: magic potions, electroshock therapy, fever cures (inject the mentally ill with malaria virus!), lobotomies, ... homeopathic medicine. More recent treatments seem more humane, but are little less arbitrary, and probably equally fleeting. Horgan is quite critical of Prozac as an antidepressant: comparative studies have found it to be no more effective than psychotherapy, cognitive therapy, or a placebo, and only 20-30% of patients are still well two years later. For psychiatric treatments, overall, Horgan credits most of the claimed benefits to a placebo effect. You don't hear this when you talk to shrinks!

The chapter on evolutionary psychology (EP) is interesting. EP explains, for example, that men are attracted to young fertile women, and women are attracted to good provider (rich) men because that yields an evolutionary advantage, and that such characteristics of human nature are inherited, not just learned. Some criticize EP as "glib and lame explanations" and "after-the-fact storytelling". Horgan does a good job of summarizing this debate.

I found the later chapters on artificial intelligence and consciousness to be too shallow and anecdotal. Horgan does not explain the leading theories in sufficient depth, and devotes too much space to fringe theories and to stories about the personalities he met at various conferences.

Regarding the future of mind science, Horgan hints that we may never really understand the mind. I came away with a more optimistic perspective: yes, our current understanding is very limited, but we'd expect neuroscience to be less mature than physics or plant biology, say, because the brain is so complex. Progress is accelerating, and in a few decades, perhaps, we'll make real strides in understanding the mind.

Discover lots of explanations..........2004-11-16

Reading individual scientific works on brain/mind issues with the goal of gaining insight into how the mind works can be - well, mind numbing. I greatly appreciate John Horgan's journalistic, no-holds-bared approach to the subject. What does he discover? The field is wide open, massively complex and contradictory. And he lets you know it in a fast paced conversational style.

I enjoyed this book very much. In particular I enjoyed the interviews with James Austin and Susan Blackmore. I respect the imposition of Mr. Horgan's personal views. This is a book by a journalist, not a peer review. I recommend it to everyone with a general interest in mind studies.

A good antidote to the hype.......2003-12-23

At a time when we are constantly bombarded with claims and counter claims about the mind in the media and the popular press, it is good to see someone finally rise above the hype and take a good critical look at the current state of Mind Science.

Opening with a discussion of the mind body problem or as Horgan calls it the "explanatory gap" and the difficulties in constructing a single theory of the mind, Horgan leaves the reader wondering if in the final analysis, such a thing is even possible.

While ultra critical, Horgan does not make the same mistakes as he did in his first book. He treats each argument fairly and reasonably. As one reviewer pointed out "Where he is skeptical he is judging scientists by their own standard: the evidence"

In my view he is at his strongest when critiquing Bio-Psychiatry and especially the pseudo- science Evolutionary Psychology, which he rightly points out its inability to perform experiments, and the impossibility of objectively determining what is a cultural or innate trait. He likens this budding "Science" to the now fading psychoanalysis, which has interesting views on human nature, but whose theories can never really be verified.

Finally, he tackles the old philosophical problem of consciousness, and highlights all the competing contradictory views on how to tackle the problem.

Of course ultimately we may solve the problems that Horgan thinks are beyond our grasp, but until then, Horgan's Critical rationalism will do just fine.

An entertaining read.......2003-12-09

Horgan takes the reader on a journalistic tour of mind science.
With wit and depth of reporting he shows just how far off we are from understanding the mind.

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