Books

A Very Foreign Foreigner

Frances Weaver — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:51:00 +0000

Author:David Pryce-Jones

Arthur Koestler had a fear that he would be forgotten and his books unread. He hoped he was a great man, for some of the time he was certain of it, but then anxiety would creep up on him. Darkness at Noon was world-famous, yes, strangers would tell him how it had influenced them. But was he then a one-book man? Why were his writings about science neglected? Surely he was raising cosmic questions in front of people who weren't listening.

Arthur Koestler: Eternal outsider

The Sex Factor

Frances Weaver — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:39:43 +0000

Author:Frances Weaver

Barbie: Every girl's dream body?

In the 1970s, the second feminist wave encouraged women to, among other things, rediscover their libido, embrace sexual freedom and welcome a guilt- and contempt-free promiscuity. These were vital tools in the fight for empowerment against men who hated us and who had conditioned us to hate ourselves.

On Being an Essayist

Frances Weaver — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:26:26 +0000

Author:Noel Malcolm

Montaigne: What a life

My first thought on seeing the title and sub-title of this book was: how to irritate, in one immediately successful attempt. The thought persisted on looking at the chapter-headings: "Q. How to live? A. Survive love and loss"; "Q. How to live? A. Give up control"; "Q. How to live? A. Be ordinary and imperfect." At first glance, this is just an example of an all-too-familiar modern publishing phenomenon, a Chicken Soup for the Soul-type of book, with new, added, bite-sized chunks of extra-nutritious Montaigne.

A Brain of Two Halves

Frances Weaver — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:19:11 +0000

Author:Adam Zeman

You possess a prodigious brain. It contains around one hundred thousand million nerve cells, with perhaps a thousand times as many interconnections between them. It is three times the size that would be predicted for an ape of our proportions. The striking process of encephalisation that has occurred since our ancestral line departed from that of the chimp, five million years ago, is undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of our humanity.

But while size matters, a line of research originally launched by 19th-century neurologists, including Pierre Broca in France and Carl Wernicke in Germany, has pointed to a second key principle of human brain evolution — the lateralisation of brain function.

Travels with Tocqueville

Frances Weaver — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:07:59 +0000

Author:Jeremy Jennings

In the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, there is a chapter devoted to "How Democracy Modifies the Relations of Servant and Master". In aristocracies such as France, Tocqueville tells us, the master views his servant as "inferior and as a secondary part of himself". In democratic America, however, no such relationship exists. There, the equality of conditions is such that the servant could aspire to become the master. Masters expected neither respect nor love nor devotion, only the honest execution of a contract. Servants saw nothing degrading about their condition as it was freely chosen and created no permanent inequality of status. Tensions arose, however, at the point when society vacillated between the aristocratic notion of subjugation and the democratic notion of obedience. Then the servant saw his master only as an unjust usurper.