Pinker's Choice

It's too early yet for reviews of Soul Made Flesh to start rolling in (it pubs in January 2004), so I'm still in an anxious state. But this is promising: The Daily Telegraph in London asked several leading writers to name the favorite book they read in 2003. Yesterday it printed the results. Steven Pinker chose Soul Made Flesh.

He writes: "Today the idea that every aspect of human experience consists of activity in the brain is second nature to some people, and an 'astonishing hypothesis'- or even sacrilege - to others. But few are aware of the ancestry of this idea. Soul Made Flesh tells the fascinating story of how people first became aware of one of the most radical thoughts the human mind has ever had to think."

(Pinker has not invented time-travel. He managed to read a 2004 book in 2003 because my publisher sent him the bound galleys this fall. Glad they did.)

I won't overload this space with reviews when they do finally come; instead, I'll be posting them here.

Tags

More like this

I tried. I really, honestly, sincerely tried. I've been struggling with this book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, for the past week and a half, and I've finally decided it's not worth the…
Isaac Newton, when he wasn't revolutionizing mathematics and almost single-handedly inventing physics as a systematic discipline, wrote some really ridiculous stuff. Alchemy, occult esoterica, you name it. In his defense, it was the 1600s. He didn't have a whole lot of prior scientific…
George Lakoff has published two new political books, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, and Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, as follow ups to his Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant. I haven't read either of the new books (my New…
Steve Brown sends in this report from the Guardian Debate on 'Climategate': I've just got back from the Guardian "ClimateGate" debate in London and here are some of the notes I made of the event. On the panel chaired by George Monbiot was Fred Pearce, Prof Trevor Davies (Vice-chancellor at UAE and…