The Tale of the Duelling Neurosurgeons, Sam Kean

I’d been eyeing this for a while, but Robert really convinced me to read it. I was worried with that title it would be a bit too silly, but I shouldn’t have worried. The tone can be light, and there are a few jokes cracked and some wry asides, but it’s more scientific than the title suggests, while still being accessible to the general reader. A lot of the cases it discusses were ones I was already aware of, but it added depth and colour. I really need to get round to reading Permanent Present Tense, a book about “H.M.”, or Henry Molaison, which I’ve already got, and I’m curious about Clive Wearing’s wife’s book about his condition (though this youtube video gives you some idea).

It also added information about scientists who’ve studied the brain, though I kept muddling up my timelines and getting confused about who discovered what and when, and how it impacted everyone else. It’s arranged more thematically than chronologically, although there is a certain chronological element too (throughout the book, it moves toward more recent incidents and discoveries), so the timeline doesn’t matter incredibly.

Altogether, I found it a good primer on the science and history of neurology, for a casual reader, and the notes and such at the back offer plenty more places to dig for interesting information. (Where the library has any of these rather specialised books might be another matter, alas.) Best of all, it never feels like a lecture: the tone is warm, and the author finds the best in people and theories rather than mocking previous insights that turned out to be wrong. Which is wise, since we don’t understand the brain yet, and all of this may yet be overturned again…

Rating: 5/5

H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald
Received to review via Netgalley

This is one of those quiet books that links nature and human grief… without really sentimentalising it. Macdonald trains Mabel (the goshawk) as a way of reconnecting with herself, of dealing with grief about her father’s death, and she writes about that beautifully without ever reducing it to a picture-perfect moment of “nature healing” or something. I actually found it pretty painful to read: recognising some of the grief, the depression; knowing all about that disconnection.

I can see why people don’t enjoy it. It’s had good press, and won awards, but it’s not an exciting triumph against adversity or a horror story written to wring the heart, something like A Child Called It. It’s a meandering through grief and back to the world, with literary allusions, glances back over the shoulder at history, at T.H. White. In a way, it’s a biography of T.H. White, as encapsulated in his own battles with his hawk — I feel like I understand him more now through Macdonald than I ever did through reading his work.

It’s not an uplifting story. It’s not a triumph. It’s uncompromising and lovely, like the hawk herself, and you have to accept the beauty as it comes, with the raw meat and grim struggles it entails as well.

Rating: 5/5

Ancestors in Our Genome, Eugene E. Harris
Received to review via Netgalley

I got this as an ARC a while ago, but never got round to reviewing it, which probably isn’t going to do me any good with the OUP approving future requests. Ah, well. This one is, if you know anything about me, obviously right up my street: so much so that most of it wasn’t new to me, whether because I read about it in New Scientist, heard about it in one of the MOOCs I’ve taken part in, or read about it in another book somewhere. So for me this was more of a review than anything: a clearly written overview of what we currently know about human evolution.

So it was almost inevitably interesting for me, but I think I would recommend it for other people too. Harris’ explanations are clear, without going into so much depth that it doesn’t fit in, say, the popular science section. It’s pretty up to date, as one would hope from such a recent publication, and it’s more or less uncontroversial (to my mind, anyway; you may disagree if the very fact that chimpanzees are our close cousins is a subject of doubt for you). So: not revelatory, but solid and easy to read, a good way to update your knowledge and brush up on where the field is now.

Rating: 4/5