Wednesday, January 23, 2008

"Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds"

WORTH CONSUMING!

Much to my chagrin, there’s no such place as a brain museum, which I was really hoping there would be one like in New York or Philly- cause that’d be a really cool place to visit. However, Postcards is a history of the brain and man’s attempts to remove it postmortem, dissect it, study it, and find out what makes us, well, us. The premise is quite simple and this book is a relatively good read. Though, I had moments of deja vu.  Have I read this book before? Some paragraphs were very “predictable” and I swear many of these pictures have been viewed by my naked eye once before.

 

When I started the project, one of the first books I read was the “Great Pretenders” and I just have this feeling that while I was reading that book, I was moonlighting this one at the same time. (I tend to only read one fiction and/or one non-fiction at a time. It gets too confusing- on the other hand- my wife reads like 9 books at one time- how she ever completes them, I’ll never know!)

 

Postcards go from very simple history to complex casts of characters to simple diagnosis to Ph.D. level examinations of the human brain. Sometimes, I found myself a little sick to my stomach and needing to take a break. And Tums! And I’ve eaten Shark Fin Soup Before. Still, throughout this book, I feel like I have read it before.

 

So, would I read it again? Maybe. It’s definitely better reading than some of the swill I had to read about philosophy. And there is some philosophy in this book that wasn’t all bad. And what’s better, it didn’t make my brain hurt.

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