Siri Hustvedt, an authoritative and independent-minded writer on the arts and sciences, brings the felt experience into her smart, stimulating and hefty new collection of essays ... What’s exciting about Hustvedt’s work is her desire for us to see the world anew ... Hustvedt does not resolve her many questions, but her exhilarating conclusion testifies to the virtues of doubt ... the strength and lucidity of Hustvedt’s good thinking calls us to have confidence in our own instincts, to be alert to delusions and inherited traditions, and to realize that many truths are fiction, and only exist to the extent that we believe them.

Among the best essays are the ones in which Hustvedt skilfully weaves her personal stories (about her mother, her daughter, her own childhood) with the state of the world, academia and technology ... I found her criticism of several thinkers, such as Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, rather unbalanced and unfair ... Hustvedt’s voice fluctuates as she moves between different subjects of interest and you might find yourself disagreeing with a few of her conclusions but it is obvious that hers is a great mind that is constantly exploring, searching, 'becoming' ... Hustvedt has provided us with an impressive collection that celebrates critical thinking.

For me, the work in the first section was the strongest, demonstrating that Hustvedt is a writer with an unusual blend of incisive intelligence, humour and imagination ... [Hustvedt] is able to combine this personal perspective with erudite analysis and, as the personal perspective is at the forefront, she is always open to uncertainty, which she sees, rightly, as itself a political stance ... We are fortunate to have Hustvedt voicing doubt so intelligently.

The middle section is a 200-page presentation of the various kinds of neurobiological work now being done on the age-old mind-body problem. It is this part of the book — the one that concentrates on the astonishing efforts being made to understand the mind as distinct from the brain — that most seriously commanded my attention...reads like the work of a talented teacher who has the drive and the ability to organize and present — in an exceptionally clear, clean, even limpid voice — a monumental amount of abstract information ... Hustvedt repeatedly gives herself over to the language of science — which, when applied to the right subject, is illuminating, but when applied to the wrong one can be jarring ... I think she is happiest — and makes the reader happiest — in the presence of the great abstractions derived from the analytic intelligence. What is missing from the pages of her book is only an equal abundance of felt life.

A serious participant in both artistic and scientific communities, Hustvedt brings a refreshingly interdisciplinary perspective to bear on each ... Readers of her 2012 essay collection, Living, Thinking, Looking, will recognize many of the themes here, but this time they have an even sharper feminist edge ... her provocative and probing essays encourage us to keep asking questions and distrust easy answers.

...[a] voluminous, humorous and wide-ranging new collection ... Hustvedt doesn't just offer up information, although there's plenty of it here; she also delivers it to her audience with an invigorating blend of personality and imagination ... Hustvedt's inquisitive and generous responses to paintings and poems give the reader the feeling of going to a museum or library with their most casually intelligent and infectiously enthusiastic friend ... Hustvedt tempers her presentation of knowledge with doubt, and the resulting book is paradoxically more satisfying in its thought-provoking ambiguity than all the confidently stated answers in the world.

These are pages intended to catch the shape of a writer’s thoughts—the tome remains more of a notebook than a series of persuasive essays, with all the indeterminacy and occasional solipsism that form entails ... But it is hard to say who exactly this particular collection is for. As searching and seductive as the essays occasionally can be, they are also absolutely maddening. For someone convinced that the truth is not just apprehended by the intellect but also felt, remembered, and imagined, Hustvedt makes little effort to welcome readers with her prose ... windiness I can forgive. Obscurity I can forgive. More off-putting is the author’s preening self-regard ... there is a lot of performative contemplation here, during which the occasion for and specifics of the chin stroking seem to matter less than the fact that the author is stroking her chin ... Hustvedt’s title makes much of her status as gimlet-eyed observer. She seeks to turn the tools of scientific examination upon the examiners, and analyze the analysts, and criticize the critics. Yet too often the object of her investigations ends up being her own excellence. For all the looking that transpires in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, there isn’t enough seeing.