The Rag and Bone Shop - Veronica O'Keane ***

Many people don't realise how recently medicine has come to be scientific. This didn't really occur comprehensively with most areas of medicine until the second half of the twentieth century. The area that has arguably lagged far behind the rest is mental health, where outdated Victorian ideas (such as those of Freud) with no scientific basis have clung on, as if we still resorted to bleeding people to make them better.

Although the book centres on memory, Veronica O'Keane shows impressively how the increasing awareness of the impossibility of divorcing aspects of the mind from the physical aspects of the brain make it necessary to have a very different understanding of mental health issues. Often an understanding of physical problems with the brain have been developed from medical cases, and O'Keane takes us effectively and interestingly through some of these cases and the functions of the different parts of the brain relevant to memory and how problems with them can induce anything from amnesia to hallucinations.

There was a small issue with a brief foray into history of science, where O'Keane comments that heliocentrism 'effectively removed Earth from the creationist dogma of the Church. At that time, the belief systems of the Church had dominated thinking for one and a half thousand years.' This sounds like a recycling of the Victorian attempt to blame Christianity for the non-existent 'dark ages' and (leaving aside the fact the 'Church' didn't exist in this sense 1500 years before Copernicus and Galileo) totally overlooks the fact that Aristotelian physics - the norm in the 1500s - would simply not work without the Earth at the centre of the universe.

The only reason I haven't rated the book higher, though, is that I didn't enjoy reading it. The scientific content is great, but the way it's presented just didn't work for me. Sometimes the writing can be rather long-winded. For example, the entire chapter 2 boils down to 'we encounter/learn things through our senses', as if this is some sort of revelation. But for the rest, it's more about style: if some popular science is like a good action thriller this is more like reading literary fiction. If you enjoy literary fiction and 'intellectual' plays, this will make the book a delight. If you find the likes of Samuel Beckett and Proust pretentious and boring, (Beckett particularly is heavily referenced here) then it will make for a difficult read.

Overall, then, this is a marmite book. The content is great, but the presentation of that content will be wonderful to some and irritating to others.

Hardback:

Bookshop.org

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

Search This Blog