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Title: Soul Made Flesh : The Discovery of the Brain--and How it Changed the World by Carl Zimmer ISBN: 0-7432-3038-8 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 06 January, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.22 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Masterful Blend
Comment: Soul Made Flesh is a masterful blend of science, history and philosophy. Carl Zimmer weaves a fascinating narrative around an overlooked historical moment - the discovery of the brain - by looping back and forth through the centuries from ancient Greece to the new millennium while keeping his gaze fixed on 17th century England. As someone schooled in the classics, whose college curriculum consisted wholly of the Great Books, I found Zimmer's new book particularly satisfying to read. Soul Made Flesh is far more than a gallop through history. It goes well beyond identifying who was influenced by who, what I call the "connecting the dots through time" approach often conveyed in reverential tones by writers who have read only secondary sources of Aristotle, Descartes or Locke. Zimmer's book breathes life into the classics by allowing the reader to "overhear" Willis and his Oxford Circle peers examining, questioning and arguing about these texts even as they toil to expand anatomical knowledge beyond all previous bounds.
As I neared the end of Soul Made Flesh, I happened to read a Boston Globe Magazine interview with Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal and, like Zimmer, a gifted science essayist. I was struck by a passage in which Barrett talks about "the unspoken disappointment of science" - research stolen or lost, specimens left in sunken ships, a life's worth of work made irrelevant by changing times. "I think about [loss] a lot. It's a very, very real part of science, but it's not the part that gets passed down," says Barrett. "We know the stories of famous scientists, but we don't hear the stories of people working hard and passionately half a tier down." Barrett could have been talking about Zimmer's book as much as her own. In Soul Made Flesh, a disillusioned old man hands over his research notes to a young passerby, scientific manuscripts are reworked to appease punitive church leaders, careers in medicine are interrupted by war, and cadavers eventually rot. Most everyone who reads Soul Made Flesh will feel a deep appreciation to Zimmer for persevering in his own research and writing to deliver a book that ensures Willis' founding contributions to neuroscience will be known, discussed and remembered.
Rating: 5
Summary: Great History & Science
Comment: Zimmer makes history lively and science understandable. It's incredible how much of our current understanding of ourselves was first proposed by Dr. Willis and his colleagues. A must read if you're interested in neuroscience.
Rating: 5
Summary: profound story, great writing
Comment: I couldn't put the book down; once begun it captured my reading time. The book covers the era when Oxford scientists truly realized that the brain was where we are at. It's the source of emotions, thoughts, and the self. The main character in this discovery, based on anatomy and experiments, was the Oxford physician Thomas Willis. Here we learn how the intricacies of an individual life lead to scientific studies of enormous import. What a life. What a time. Willis' friends and circle of colleagues included Hooke, Boyle, and Wren. They saw deeply into the implications of the scientific method, yet were still much on the cusp of superstition and alchemy as well. When they conducted science, almost everything they touched was a new discovery. This was the time when the basic paradigm of neuroscience began, a paradigm that continues to this day (which Zimmer brings us up to in a final chapter), a paradigm that is creating ever more difficult questions about who we are, what is free will, and what is consciousness. --Tyler Volk, author of "Metapatterns," "Gaia's Body," and "What is Death?"
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Title: The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought by Gary F. Marcus ISBN: 0465044050 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 16 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson ISBN: 0743241657 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 10 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0618335404 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 29 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul by Roy Porter, Simon Schama ISBN: 0393050750 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2004 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Evolution : The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer ISBN: 0060958502 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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