About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Patrick House
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books House is a pleasure to read. Like Oliver Sacks and like Robert Sapolsky, who advised him at Stanford, House distills the details of psychiatry and neurology into digestible forms ... It is almost as if House’s kaleidoscope has not only refracted his view of the brain but also become his view of the brain. In his eyes, the brain is a scientific instrument eerily like those he uses to study it ... Evincing a soft ecumenicalism, House’s book is sprinkled with literary references that serve mostly as an entrée into scientific approaches their authors or inventors inadvertently foretold or confirmed ... Still, a few texts are conspicuous in their absence ... At times, his 19 ways click into place like an ingenious kaleidoscope; at others, they come apart in your hands, as if the only thing holding them together was House’s decision to dedicate a chapter to each ... None of House’s 19 ways intersect with religious, humanistic, or literary perspectives (despite his literary references). We never see consciousness as a point of contact with the divine, or as something that extends beyond the individual mind, as Chalmers himself proposes it might. Give House 19 more ways to look and he’d meet some surprising characters: ghosts, say, or government agencies. Neuroscience might get weirder, in a welcome way.
John Tresch
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books ... splendid ... Weaving private letters and published works into a broader history, Tresch uses Poe as a drunken Virgil, through whose hazy eyes we catch glimpses of abolitionism and the Mexican-American War, new technologies and the Second Great Awakening. The effect is dizzying — and part of the point. Presidential elections are on par with editorial spats, hoaxes sit side by side with discoveries. In Poe’s mind (if not Tresch’s), boundaries — between self and other, science and society, poetry and politics — tend to shimmer, even dissipate. It’s not just that Poe was an outsider (though he was); even the insiders experienced the Jacksonian period as one of dissolution. But Poe seems to have felt the era’s ups and downs more acutely than almost anyone ... taking biography as a starting point rather than an end in itself, we find a lesson we share with Poe: that the only thing scarier than a sense of our limits is the fiction that we can somehow transcend them.