RaveThe Los Angeles TimesWith C, Tom McCarthy has written an avant-garde masterpiece — a sprawling cryptogram — in the guise of an epic, coming-of-age period piece ... According to McCarthy, death makes life — and art — beautiful, and C exalts the materialism of both life and art over false promises of transcendence ... C also argues for a destroying-to-create sort of writing ... McCarthy orchestrates an almost incestuous intimacy among older texts and writers ... C is coming-of-age as philosophy, philosophy as fiction, fiction as \'dummy-chamber\' (\'the real thing’s beyond\') — the novel as encrypted code for life.
Oliver W Sacks
PositiveThe Los Angeles TimesAgain and again, Sacks invites readers to imagine their way into minds unlike their own, encouraging a radical form of empathy ... And yet, Sacks’ repeated insistence in this book on the inability of one person to imagine the perceptions of another seems to throw his project into question. If we cannot imagine our way into the minds of people radically different from ourselves, then what is the point of all these elaborate and gorgeously detailed case studies in The Mind’s Eye? What is the point of literature? ... The Mind’s Eye expresses a stubborn hope that rests on language, \'that most human invention,\' which Sacks says \'can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.\'
Nathaniel Rich
PositiveThe New Republic\"... a gripping tale of classic Aristotelian tragedy ... When you tell the story of climate change like this, maybe readers will feel that they can (finally) understand it. It offers a way to think about what is otherwise a nearly unthinkable problem. All of which seems terribly promising. And judged by the metric of whether it is an engaging story that keeps the reader flipping pages, Losing Earth is a resounding success. You have to admire the narrative alchemy by which Rich transmutes what is basically a series of meetings and conferences into a riveting will-they-or-won’t-they drama ... To tell the story as tragedy, Rich has to sacrifice important truths—both small and large ... Rich also ignores his story’s broader historical context ... Rich’s reporting is clearly extensive and thoughtful, and yet so often contradicts his narrative that it’s as if one hand is unwilling to know what the other is doing ... The deeper problem with Rich’s call to moralism as a spur to action is its ineffectiveness in building consensus and facilitating change—the stuff of politics ... Losing Earth is, perhaps unwittingly, an excellent reminder that the way we define problems shapes our definition of solutions.\
Carl Zimmer
RaveThe London Review of Books‘We use words like sister and aunt as if they describe rigid laws of biology,’ Zimmer writes, ‘but these laws are really only rules of thumb. Under the right conditions, they can be readily broken.’ This is clear if you widen the lens, as Zimmer so artfully does, to explore multiple channels of heredity, including the microbiome, epigenetics and culture. Along the way, he reveals that the way we talk about heredity...isn’t linked to science at all. At every turn, Zimmer tries to complicate the concept of heredity and challenge received wisdom about why we are the way we are ... She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is brimming with...surprising discoveries; and the cumulative effect is a radical destabilization of the boundaries conventionally drawn around the individual, families, and even the human species ... Zimmer does not attempt to erase the concept of race as a meaningful category, and his skilfull handling of the subject is a welcome contribution to current contentious discussions of race and genetics.
Peter Godfrey-Smith
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesGodfrey-Smith has rolled his obsessions into one book, weaving biology and philosophy into a dazzling pattern that looks a lot like the best of pop science ... Godfrey-Smith relates dramatic stories of mischief made by captive octopuses and spends a delightful chapter exploring cephalopods’ sophisticated color-changing abilities, but this is not narrative nonfiction about the secret life of cephalopods, along the lines of Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus. This is a gifted philosopher and historian of science doing philosophy with octopuses. His project is no less ambitious than to work out the evolutionary origins of subjective experience ... he delivers philosophy wrapped even more firmly in the glittering cloak of popular science. The result is an incredibly insightful and enjoyable book.
