RaveThe SpectatorJust when you thought there was nowhere left to explore, along comes an author with a new category of terrain — not scenes where man has never trod, but places where he has been and gone ... For reasons of safety or budget or both, Flyn doesn’t visit all the places she writes about. But the dozen sites she sees, each of which forms a chapter, she describes with dazzling flair. Just occasionally, she gets pretentious ... But in general her prose is as pragmatic as it is poetic ... Flyn is careful not to say we can relax about the scale of damage we have done, and continue to do, to the environment. But clearly, nature’s capacity for recovery must be a part of the picture.
A K Benjamin
MixedThe SpectatorAs for Benjamin’s self-exposure, it’s a striptease. His maddening, saddening, slow-burn belter of a book at first seems to be a series of case studies, an episodic but more or less conventional memoir of his career ... The slippery nature of the truth is one of his favoured themes: the idea not just that truth is hard to pin down, but that it may not exist in the way you suppose. It’s one thing to make this argument, another to embody it in your prose — actually far harder, given the linear nature of language. Benjamin does both ... a first chapter that’s so overwritten as to be almost unendurable .. as the chapters pass, the author finds his stride. He stops sprinting and waving his arms. And his facility for language, pin-sharp percipience, and sensitivity to micro-shifts in moods, become clear ... Although it achieves an accumulative fascination, his literary striptease never dares full nudity.
Nick Chater
RaveThe SpectatorReading The Mind is Flat is like watching The Truman Show and realising, while you’re watching it, that you are Truman ... (Chater\'s) easeful prose takes its place in the humane, Humean tradition of British empiricist philosophy, moving with clarity and composure towards its revolutionary goal. It’s a triumph in itself that he has written a book about cognition that is as gripping as a thriller. I’m serious about this. You feel compelled to turn the pages to find out how it ends. In fact, I would go even further. If you can measure a book by how often you find yourself bringing it up in conversation, then The Mind is Flat is one of the best I’ve ever read.
