Bradford Books

Richard Feynman said that if you cant express an idea clearly and simply, you probably dont know what you claim to know. Calvin failed Feyman's test.

This book is not well-written. It is a struggle to read. The writing is awful. Compared to his other books, I'm thinking a grad student cobbled this one together. Maybe copied Calvin's notes. This, or maybe Calvin had the other books ghosted by a competent writer. I'm not sure which it is.

Calvin's thesis isnt hard to grasp, but he seems to deliberately write jumbled prose with long words to explain simple concepts. Maybe its a game pedagogues play with each other so colleagues remain clueless.

The author introduces the book as one about thoughts, memories, consciousness, creativity, etc., with his goal being to put these subjects in the context of an evolutionary paradigm. The cerebral cortex represents mental images via a Darwinian process, recombining them to create something totally original. When considering my dreams, or the moments of consciousness when I am just falling off to sleep, I can certainly sympathize with the author's thesis. However, throughout the book I wanted to see equations and graphs, discussions on mathematical modeling/simulations and laboratory experiments. Instead the approach is purely descriptive, making the book somewhat of a disappointment. The author though warns the reader early on that he resisted the temptation to utilize computer simulations, citing the need for clarity, and his skepticism of "free-parameter curve-fitting" as the main reasons. But even though the author takes a purely qualitative approach, it is still embedded in a scientific description, and not mere philosophical handwaving.

The first two chapters are an overwiew of the author's solution of the representation problem, this problem in his view being which spatio-temporal pattern represents a mental object. The author is clearly influenced by the neurologist D.O.Hebb, and throughout the book he attempts to answer the representational questions that Hebb posed back in the 1940's. Cerebral representations must explain spatial-only and spatiotemporal patterns, their interconversions, redundancy, spatial extent, and imperfections, and how they are linked to associative memory. Arguing for the need for copying, the author shows how it can arise in the neocortex. His (Darwinian) mechanism for copying takes place among the interactions of the superficial pyramidal neurons, due to their physical properties and their geometric layout. Interestingly, the phenomenon of "emergent synchrony", familiar to the physics reader in the motion of the double pendulum, is shown to play a role in the copying mechanism. Indeed the superficial layers of the neocortex are shown to form (ephemeral) triangular arrays interacting via entrainement.

The next few chapters are devoted to showing just how the triangular arrays result in successful representations. The stability of the triangular arrays formed by the "hot spots" under perturbation is addressed, the author showing how the six "nearest neighbors" have a correcting influence on the spot if it fires out of sync with them. The minimal Hebbian cell-assembly is thus shown to be a hexagon, and that author shows how they are related to triangular arrays: namely, that two triangular arrays can alter synaptic strengths and create attractors within a hexagon's circuitry that sustain the firing pattern. The author's use of concepts and constructions from dynamical systems in this chapter and the next two is very interesting but made me thirst for more quantitative justification. Indeed chaotic dynamics is brought in to explain the "memorized environment", which for the author is the most difficult problem to explain from the standpoint of his Darwinian shaping-up process. Calling chaos "controlled disorder", the author holds that the EEG patterns in deep sleep are limited-cycle rhythmicity, that Parkinson tremors are the result of fixed-point attractors, and the Necker cube perspective switching is switching in and out of lobes of an attractor. He does admit though that all these are "loose analogies" and goes on to explain in more detail how resonances influence cortical territory by spatio-temporal patterns that arrive by lateral cloning. The Darwinian paradigm via the overlaid hexagons is asserted to be one of the elementary mechanisms for category formation, and thus are able to deal with higher levels of abstraction, such as one finds in advanced mathematics. If the mechanism put forward by the author is correct in explaining such high-level reasoning, this would be a major advance in cognitive science.

As if detecting that the reader-scientist may be disenchanted with purely philosophical discussion, the author elaborates on his Darwinian paradigm in the rest of the book and offers a new perspective on the nature of categories in the context of this paradigm. He adheres to the assertion that categories are indispensable for using words in a referential manner, as linguistic symbols do not relate directly to the objects in the world, but to concepts of the classes which the objects belong. A hierarchical network of meanings is essential for this to occur. The author has taken on a problem of enormous difficulty here, but does give explanations that seem plausible. The "hexagons for cerebral codes" are capable he says of handling any level of abstraction or representation. Interestingly, his explanations make use of another concept from physics, that of Brownian motion, to discuss the role and origin of associative memory in his Darwinian paradigm. The role of "recombination" in the Darwinian process is explained as a need for integrating codes that are stored separately in the brain into a "master code" for a particular concept. "Hexagonal cloning competitions" are thought of as processes by which information can be (serially) ordered and missing information can be identified. The author makes his case for the utility of metaphor crystal clear, for without such metaphors he says, without imagination, we will have no mechanisms to mold experience or to discover new things. Consciousness too, deemed the most complex of phenomena to be described by a theory of brain function, is explained in the context of his hexagonal neocortical arrays. Consciousness is a result of the multiple levels of "stratified stability", each of these employing Darwinian processes to enhance quality and create new things. In addition, he discusses practical consequences of his brain theory in psychiatry, rather than in merely explaining the capabilities of the brain.

With more experimentation, with more modeling, with more simulations, and with further refinements and clarifications to the physical concepts which he uses, his ideas will become vastly more convincing. However exotic they may appear, his ideas, and others in brain modeling, will require careful elucidation, and future developments are to be greeted with eager anticipation.

Calvin contends that brains think by virtue of
being "Darwin Machines", machines that emulate
biological evolution but on a much reduced time
scale. He goes on to suggest how these processes
might occur in biological neural networks.
Unfortunately his ideas have not been developed
to the point of actual algorithms and experiments.
This is what is missing. While recurrent excitation
is known to occur what about Calvin's "triangular
arrays", "lateral cloning", "hot spots", "synchronous
recuitment", "attractor formation", "pattern
competition", "memory recall", etc. etc.? All of
these ideas need to be fleshed out, coded in
artificial neural network software, and sought in
computer simulations. Such experiments are what is
needed to turn speculation into theory. As a happy
biproduct if such experiments prove successful one
would have a working prototype artificial intelligence.

Most attempts to describe how thought works either start at a very low level (such as a single neuron) and have trouble scaling up to anything complex, or start at an abstract level (e.g. Minsky's Society of Mind) that don't come close to the level of detail needed for computer simulations of a working mind.
This book is the best attempt I've seen to bridge that gap. It is almost detailed enough to suggest how the patterns involved could be built out of individual neurons, while providing ideas about how to create complex patterns.
It still isn't specific enough to create a simulation that would produce anything resembling human thought, but I can imagine that Calvin's theory will prove to be one of the bigger steps needed to create such a simulation.

Calvin surprised me in this book.
I am the kind of guy interested in intelligence, how it might work biologically, and lastly I was given an advice by a fellow at bionet.neuroscience.
The book gave me food for thought, and even as I am studying neurology in much more detail; "Principles of Neural Science" by Kandel et al; the basic idea that Calvin lay down in written form is still influencing me.
But if you really want the best usage of this book, you at least have to know SOME basics (which I didn't have to much of), and read the book when you know what corticothalamic pathways mean.
5 stars for the book, well deserved.
This applies also for "How Brains Think" which was written before the "The Celebral Code".
I urge you to get both books, read first "How Brains Think", and then "The Celebral Code".

Adams' text is seminal in the field of literacy, especially early literacy. Of course, originally published in 1990, the text is slightly out-dated, especially considering the vast body of educational and psychological research which has emerged in the past 18 years. However, as a seminal text, its influence is quite profound. The only reason it's marked a four instead of five is that Adams forgets that phonics is part of whole language (see Weaver's and Goodman's research and texts on reading) and was not meant to be separated from whole language. Instead, phonics instruction is contextual and authentic (based on reading/writing activities in which the students participate). Read Frank Smith, Ken Goodman, Yetta Goodman & Eileen Burke, and Constance Weaver for some good analyses of reading - and definitely look for their research studies.

If you are a reading teacher that is interested in learning how chldren learn to read and what methods work best, this is a fantastic book. Every possible variable is objectively broken down and examined. I learned more about teaching reading from this book than any other book I've read.

This book contains gems: there is no question about that. The `reading-literacy' project was given solid funding by the government and Ms. Adams has done a superlative job of surveying the literature and coming up with reasonable conclusions.

That said, there is a problem. And the problem is that "Beginning to Read" was written for bureaucrats. The straightforward language we might expect from an educator and researcher is therefore made obscure, obtuse, and overly `officious'. [No doubt pleasing to the edu-crats.]

For example, (from page 413; the summary): "It is because of the process of comprehension consists of actively searching the overlap among words for syntactic and semantic coherence that reading depends so critically on the speed and automaticity of word recognition."

[Or, in other words, reading comprehension depends on speed and automatic word recognition so that the nascent reader can make use of syntax and semantics. ]

Not incomprehensible in it's original form, Adam's verbiage is awkward and somehow embarrassing for a book that is supposed to be about `reading' and `comprehension'.

Three Stars. A comprehensive survey of current and past literature, this book attempts--and in my opinion succeeds-- in reconciling the phonics versus whole language camps. However, expect a slog of it. [Unless of course you are an edu-crat in which case the officiousness will sound very convincing indeed-lol]

Anyone else interested in this topic but with less time might find the same information in a `tastier' format in the following books: Mem Fox's "Reading Magic"; and the slightly less digestible "Raising Lifelong Learners" by Lucy McCormick Calkins.

Pam T.

This book offers a wealth of information about reading development. It is a terrific source, as well for the scientist, as for the interested layman. Although it is biased toward the Seidenberg and McClelland model, the wealth of empirical data is more than compensating. It is an heroic attemt to synthesize different viewpoints.

I have 30 years of experience as an educator in the area of indigenous education. This is a wonderful and exciting book for educators and researchers, who are used to the technical terminology and academic genre, but for teachers and parents, a 148-page summary of the book has been published, which is not an easy-reading style, but is beautifully written. Unfortunately it is out of print, but it is listed on Amazon.com, and sometimes it might be available used. This unabridged version was comissioned by the US government, to evaluate all of the research in beginning reading to the date when it was written. The author did a remarkable job of pulling it all together under one cover, and a brilliant job of evaluating and applying the research. Obviously there could be one or another research project since its publication which might invalidate some conclusion in the book. However, the major questions involved in teaching beginning reading have been thoroughly researched and there ARE definitive answers to the questions that are still being debated by teachers and parents ten and twenty years after the research was done. For example, this book (and its summary edition) tells you what kind of reading methods are most effective (there is no reason to continue to debate the phonics vs. whole language issue based on how you feel about them - see what research has proven to be most effective), what kind of preschool experience can still set the students apart even when they are graduating from high school, and other important facets of education which teachers and parents ignore to the detriment of their students.

When I was reading this book, I could not stop reading it and never got bored reading it.

Here is a tragic story of a young American man, Eddie D. Slovik, who had straightened out his life, after a life of spending approximately a total of 5 years in reformatories and jails for petty crimes and thefts, then found a steady job during World War II on the home front, and married a strong woman, whom he loved very dearly. Then, his promising life as a truly reformed ex-convict with a potentially bright future was abruptly disrupted and ended, when he was drafted into the Army as a "replacement private" to fight in the final bloody stages of World War II.

It was the first tragedy in Private Slovik's short life for this to happen to him, as he went from being classified by his local Draft Board from 4-F (not fit for military service and when the US Military did not want any part of him) to 1-A (immediately available for military service). His promising life truly was wasted and went up in smoke.

The second tragedy in Private Slovik's life is when he was the only soldier in World War II to be executed for desertion, since the U.S. Civil War in the 1860's. Despite desertion during time of war is very wrong and a very serious offense, and in my opinion should be severely punished, it was unfair to single him out for execution. "Although over twenty-one thousand soldiers were given varying sentences for desertion during World War II--including forty-nine death sentences--only Slovik's death sentence was carried out." (Source/Cited from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Slovik). Private Slovik should have of course been tried by General Court Cartial, then given a sentence of prison or should NOT have had his execution actually carried out. Thus, he would have been given a new start and a second chance in life in Post-World War II America. This is among one of the worst injustices carried out during the final stages of this war.

This book is definitely a must read for those who are interested in military history and/or studying the history of World War II. I highly recommend this book, both for the study of history and an as an excellent novel, good for both serious study and for recreational reading.

Slovik got what he deserved. He did not give a rip about his fellow soldiers. He was a deserter and a traitor. A perfect example of why capital punishment is a good thing.

"The Execution of Private Slovik" tells the story of the only American soldier since the Civil War who was executed by firing squad for desertion. Eddie Slovik was one of literally thousands of documented deserters during WWII who were court-martialled. Of these thousands, forty-nine were sentenced to death, but only Slovik's sentence was carried out. So the author's central question is, why was Slovik the ONLY one?

We see Eddie Slovik as a youth who, in the modern vernacular, was "at risk" due to some minor scrapes with the law as a teenager. We then see him as a somewhat self-absorbed adult who never thought he would be caught up in the wartime draft and was resentful that he was forced to leave his new wife and new furniture. Once shipped overseas and assigned to a unit, Slovik apparantly intentionally deserts, calculating that he would be thrown into the stockade only for a few years and eventually set free during the euphoria brought on by the war's end. A huge miscalculation.
The author makes a compelling argument that the wartime Army's senior leaders found it easier to execute a deserter "with a civilian record", even though such information was not supposed to be material to court-martial sentences, and the "record" amounted to nothing more than some petty crime when Slovik was a minor.
This book was written in 1954, when it could not have been fashionable to write an investigative piece portraying then-President Eisenhower in a somewhat less-than-flattering light (Eisenhower, as Supreme Allied Commander, ORDERED Slovik shot--very different from declining to intervene). Huie is to be commended for this courageous and thoughtfully-written book.

The Execution of Private Slovik reads somewhat like a college term paper but because of the gripping subject it maintains the reader's interest. Thoroughly documented and cited, the author goes to great pains to challenge the reader to question why this event occurred. The author's question centers on whether Eddie was accurate in his belief that he was really being punished for the petty crimes of his youth. Great book for WWII buffs as well as people interested in Death Penalty issue.

Is this book worth reading? Yes, but...the reader should be aware that the writer does seem to have a biased view of his subject. While Pvt. Slovik does seem to be a scapecoat for other deserters, at the same time, I doubt that others flaunted their refusal to obey orders as blatantly as he did. My father also served in the 28th Division, 109th Infantry Regiment and was undoubtedly as afraid as Pvt. Slovik. War is truly hell and I'm sure that he wanted to be anywhere but where he was, but he realized his duty to help eradicate the greatest evil of the 20th century. Thank God for the men (and women) of his generation! Were it not for them, we would not be free to live as we do today! After reviewing Pvt. Slovik's history, it would seem that his desertion was yet one more event in a life lived as a sociopath. As such, he had no redeeming value to consider nor should he have expected mercy. I reserve my tears for the thousands of soldiers who deserve them...those who gave their lives so we might live ours.

You will find Churchland's arguments compelling. She builds her case methodically and comprehensively. Neurophilosophy presents another dimension to a variety of phenomena. This grounding is valuable because it has you reconsider your usual way of looking at how you look at the world.

I had difficulty with this work when I tackled it a decade ago. I recently took up Richard C. Vitzthum's "Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition" and benefitted tremendously by learning the context in which "Neurophilosophy" developed.

Now that I understand the context, I am returning to this book. It remains relevant. The amount of technical detail gives weight to the intellectual satisfaction it provides.

i have a full shelf when it comes to philosophy and cog-sci, so when i saw this title i picked it up naturally. however compelled i am to get through it, i haven't finished this book.

the reason i can't finish this book is not because it reads (as someone posted previously) too much like a biology textbook, but because it reads like an [insert obscure foreign language here] instruction manual crossed with a doctoral thesis!

the book is chock full of good stuff, but i can't swim through the cold and unfriendly verbiage. And I read through Wolfram's NKS no problem, which was a pretty annoying writing style to say the least...

fortunately i see that she has come out with another book on the subject, which i trust is more user-friendly.

This book begins with a complete and somewhat dry but useful tour of the history of neuropsychology, complete with major discoveries and the arguments that predated them, showing their conclusions and how it has led to the construction of an in-progress model of human intelligence. This is followed by a summarization of general epistemological arguments from the discipline of philosophy, concluding with a general understanding of how our world functions relative to our own intelligences. In the process, the author argues convincingly for a materialist - or "limited to the physical world only" - understanding of human consciousness and how thoughts are generated, avoiding un-politically-correct conclusions entirely but thoroughly debunking any religious, dualistic or overly idealized conclusions about human individuality. Rough reading at times but an excellent compendium of information.

Published over 17 years ago, this book was one of the first examples of the now accelerating trend to make philosophical investigations into the mind/brain problem accountable to modern science. Pure speculation once dominated any discussion of the mind (or the brain) and therefore progress in the field by any measure was non-existent. There are of course still purely philosophical investigations into the mind/body problem, but these will no doubt decay rapidly with time as scientific investigations continue to lay to rest various "impossibility" claims philosophers have made about the physical brain. Indeed, in this century, the rise of machine intelligence will hammer the last nail in the coffin of mind/brain philosophical speculation.

The author of the book is a materialist, and in this book she has given an excellent justification of her position, and expresses at all times fairness to those who disagree with her positions and conclusions. She also expresses a rare intellectual honesty about the scientific evidence supporting her claims, informing the reader at every place in the book where it is not available or weak at best. Without a doubt the author was not happy at the state of philosophy at the time the book was published, holding that it completely omitted neuroscience, and embraced in her words "a novel and sophisticated form of dualism". She explains this was ample reason for her to take the plunge into a more scientific/empirical framework. The book is an excellent example of what can result when a philosopher decides to do this.

The book is divided up into three parts, with the first one emphasizing the biology of nervous systems and neuropsychology, the second part an overview of developments in the philosophy of science, and the third part discussing the ramifications of neurobiology for research in artificial intelligence. Although somewhat out of date due to the advancements in both experimental and theoretical neuroscience since then, it could still be of interest, mainly to philosophers, who are interested in applying their talent for logical thinking and organization to difficult problems in neuroscience. The transition from pure philosophical speculation to the rigors of scientific investigation may at first be difficult for the typical armchair philosopher, but their high degree of intelligence and their restless desire to get at the truth will soften it considerably. And in the decades ahead, one will witness the presence of "industrial philosophers": those who have chosen to leave the "proverbial armchair" and apply their abilities to both understand and give rise to intelligent machines.

I was looking for something different. The photographs are beautiful but they are mostly not of the mountain in which I was interested.

TERRIBLE COPY - FALLING APART - PAID VERY HIGH PRICE AND WAS VERY DISAPPOINTED WITH THE QUALITY OF THE BOOK. WHEN PURCHASED IT SAID IT WAS IN EXCELLENT CONDITION.

This book is a marvelous record of mountain exploration and photography with photos that span a period of almost 70 years. This small collection representing much less than 1% of Washburn's photographs is a remarkable record of photography rivaling Ansel Adams or Vittorio Sella. Although the photos were originally taken to support his geological or surveying research or to provide guide shots for climbers, Washburn soon realized that he had a knack for taking photographs as art that were as good as any being produced by other photographers.

This book may be a disappointment for those who want expedition photographs as few of the photographs include people. Indeed, having a few more pictures of people would have warranted five stars. Yet, many of the pictures are aerial photographs so the lack of people in many is not surprising. What makes it ultimately worthwhile is the crispness of the pictures, the attention to details on the ridges and valleys of the mountains, the patterns revealed in the flow of glaciers, and so on.

One other point of interest is that this book was the Grand Prize Winner of the 2000 Banff Mountain Book Festival -- the only pure photography book to win that award.

Bradford Washburn roamed the globe for eighty years as a mountaineer, explorer, cartographer, and aerial photographer. In Bradford Washington: Mountain Photography, Tony Decaneas as assembled one hundred full-size landscape mountain photographs from the more than ten thousand images that Bradford made during his lifetime of photographic accomplishments. From the Grand Canyon to the Alps, from Mount McKinley to Mount Everest, these black and white landscape photos of mountain peaks and picture portraits of team members and colorful characters that are each of them museum quality visual images showcasing Bradford's photography as having risen to the level of fine art.

After the exhiliration generated by Washburn's classic book on Denali, this one left me slightly disappointed. There are many exquisite photographs and a few truly great ones, such as the famous picture of climbers on the Doldenhorn (in the Bernese Alps). But on the whole there are just a little bit too many pictures of abstract geological features. These reveal a more scholarly side of Washburn's art: interesting to round out our view on this great artist, but less captivating than the epic mountain pictures. Also, there is an appendix with a detailed account of Washburn's career, with many little inset pictures of people he worked with (Barbara Washburn being the most prominent amongst them). I would have liked to see many more of these pictures and at a size more amenable to detailed study. A final point of criticism on this book concerns the interview with Washburn by the editor: it is very revealing but way too short! I would have guessed that Decaneas would have been able to extract much more material from all the conversations he has had with Washburn in the final years of his life. So, it's a nice book to have in the library, but Decaneas missed an opportunity to put together an absolute classic. Pity.

While tough sledding in sections for those without a grounding in biology, this volume weds an overview of philosophy from Aristotle to the moderns, to the latest studies in how the brain and its constituent parts actually "work", and discusses in clear language the tentative conclusions that can be currently drawn. Since it discusses metaphysical subjects, those conclusions will meet a priori disagreement, but all readers will have a solid foundation to judge the issues for themselves.

Philosophical purists will criticize Churchland for refusing to engage the philosophical "tradition" on its own terms, i.e., she refuses to stick her head in the sand and theorize as if neuroscience and psychology didn't exist. Rather, what Churchland has done is invert this traditional philosphical stance : survey the scientific results on topics philosophers have wanted to claim as their own: consciousness, free will, the self, human knowledge, religion, and the like (each gets a chapter in her book). That is, make a conscious effort to bring empirical results to bear on these thorny problems of human existence. While neuropsychology can't provide decisive answers yet, its data provides new ideas, new constraints, and casts doubt on those doctrines (such as the 'unity of the self') previously taken as sacrosanct by the head-in-the-sand philosophical establishment.

Overall, a very clearly written book, with lots of interesting ideas and data. If you want your traditional convoluted philosophical treatise, go somewhere else. If you want to be invigorated with new ideas and data from cutting edge neuroscience, then pick up this book!

Brain-wise is, to say the least, a less than impressive effort from a philosopher as prominent in philosophy of mind as Churchland is. A short list of complaints includes:

-Churchland collapses the distinction between 'consciousness' in the phenomenal sense ('subjective character of experience') & 'consciousness' in the psychological sense (awareness or self-consciousness)(see Chalmers, 'The Conscious Mind')

-most of her conclusions are simply asserted rather than argued, & when she does make arguments they are startlingly simple-minded

-the book completely overstates the progress of neuroscience, a field still very much in its infancy. She speaks about neuroscience as if she were in complete awe, which is quite unjustified, & she seems to have a bad case of science-envy

-she assumes that all sciences are reducible, which ignores the fact that (as Chomsky argues, although to say he 'argues' this neglects to express the obviousness of his conclusion) we are cognitively limited beings, & that there may simply be aspects of the world that are beyond the reach of our scientific capacities.

-she hauls out the tired vitalist analogy

-she admits the failure of logical supervenience of the phenomenal on the physical, yet fails to see why this counts against materialism (again, see Chalmers)

-the section on religion is just feeble, & includes not one original thought. Most of her 'insights' are along the lines of 'the prospect of [death] ... need not be [unsettling] ... one can live a richly purposeful life of love and work--of family, community, wilderness, music, and so forth--cognizant that it makees sense to make the best of this life'.

Anyway, I suppose someone interested in philosophy of mind should read this, if only because Churchland and her husband are such celebrities in the field. But don't expect much. As an introduction to neuroscience, I am not in a position to judge Brain-wise; my hunch is that if you simply want to become informed as to the latest developments in the field, there are more appropriate books out there. As philosophy, the book is depressingly weak.

This book is only one example of the current practice by philosophers of essentially abandoning their craft and worshiping at the altar of science. Philosophy had always tried to go beyond observation of perceived physical reality alone, and deal with questions such as--in the branch of philosophy known as epistemology--how is knowledge of that reality, or of matters like principles of logic and mathematics, acquired.

What is pitiful is that the author of the book tries to subsume even these questions under physical science, thus putting the cart before the horse. She tries to find answers to what constitutes consciousness by studying the brain, forgetting that our knowledge of the brain and other physical occurrences depends itself on their manifestation in consciousness. We first have to know how reality is constructed in our minds, before exploring further physical particulars.

The author of the book, and she is not the only one to do so, goes as far as attempting to define consciousness in terms of the brain, committing the gross fallacy of equivocation. The fallacy consists in giving a name a new meaning and then trying to prove something about the originally named. But something proved about the newly meant does not thereby apply to what was meant before.

A basic endeavor of Professor Churchland is to eventually in some such way equate consciousness with some part of the brain. But although she tirelessly cites and illustrates minute and extensive studies, she fails to indicate what kind of findings so made would establish that identity. In the process, while a number of times branding other authors with circularity--with assuming a fact before proving it--though she does not say where the circularity resides, she indulges in the persistent circularity of arguing for the brain as the self while beforehand assuming that the brain, as the self, learns and so forth, and she names a chapter accordingly (p.321).

Circularity, the act of begging the question, is, to be sure, another fallacy, and the book contains additional lapses of logic. Earlier in the book (p.55) its author suggests that if A implies B then not-A implies not-B. This commits the fundamental fallacy of "denying the antecedent", and the book exhibits other failures in reasoning. Its author, concerning again definition, argues (p.267) that "the indivisible", which was the original meaning of "atom", turned out to be divisible. This is of course a glaring contradiction. The word "atom" was later applied to a physical unit found divisible, but this was merely a redefinition. The book asserts similar nonsense regarding parallel lines. They are in geometry defined as straight lines that never meet, and the book's author claims they meet. She is obviously not only illogical but insufficiently acquainted with geometry, in some of which parallel lines are said not to exist, rather than to, contradictorily, meet. "Half knowledge is worse than no knowledge", as they say, and a similar warning can apply in general when philosophers dabble in science.

By wanting to in the preceding manner downgrade past understandings, the book tries in the main, as do related ones, to forcibly dispense with the presence of consciousness by insistence that it must be material, instead of viewing it, alongside other events connected with matter, as the phenomenon it is, and by which all reality is ascertained.

This masterly book summarizes a prodigious amount of research about the workings of the brain. Author Patricia Smith Churchland introduces the basics of neuroscience to the realm of philosophy. She says that present scientific knowledge about the brain makes it implausible that there is any such thing as an immaterial mind or soul. A committed materialist (although she does not make the case for materialism), she puts a mass of incomplete scientific evidence before you and says that more scientific evidence will emerge over the next decade or so to complete the picture and solidify the case. She does not do justice to contrary views, which she introduces as straw men, easily knocked down. That said, we find that Churchland provides a valuable, highly readable discussion of the challenges neuroscience presents to philosophy. She makes it clear that any philosophy of consciousness must be informed by knowledge of the brain.

I loved Mr. Morrow's writing style and prose. Some people say it was boring, but I thought it was just enough to pull you into the book. I found it very suspenseful towards the end, and was somewhat surprised by the ending. I enjoyed the book immensely.

What I find most successful about Giovanni's Gift is Morrow's ability to write a work that is incredibly approachable but which still offers the more literary reader many levels of complexity and allusion: from references to the Pandora myth to reappropriating with Herman Melville's description of reading of Hawthorne. Readers can choose how much to take away--Giovanni's Gift satisfies as story, as a character study, and as a finely constructed structure of language. Morrow's prose contains the only descriptions of Colorado I know of that genuinely take me back there, and he's not afraid to embrace a lyricism that makes these descriptions shimmer and resonate. The sentences are carefully patterned, and Morrow moves with precision and control from the pastoral and the bucolic to playing with conventions of mystery, myth, the gothic, the meditation and other genres, employing a narrator who reveals himself as much by the way he tells his story as by what he tells. Giovanni's Gift is a fine novel, well worth reading.

I appreciate good writing, particularly since it's becoming harder and harder to find. Turning a lyrical phrase effectively in a piece of prose is a skill not every writer can muster. Such is the case here. Aside from the lack of a compelling plot (how long did it take you to figure out our boy was dating a relative? - certainly a lot sooner than he did)Morrow doesn't know when to turn off the stylist in himself. I once heard a critic call Robert James Waller's writing style "gaseous". That critic obviously hasn't opened this book. I'll go one step further and call Morrow's style gastric (as in distress).

I hate to give a book a bad review, but after noting the high praise other reviewers have given this book, I have to reply. I bought the book solely because I read the cover story article in New York magazine on the making of this book and Mr. Morrow's six figure advance for it ("How to Make a Bestseller" 2/10/97.) Needless to say, I was very disappointed. I think I read a little over the first one hundred pages before I had to put the book down. The story was almost melodramatic, and at times the writing so veered towards the sentimental, that I couldn't believe this was coming from the same man who edits Conjunctions, which is primarily known for its experimental use of language. Trust the NY Times Review of Books on this one. Maybe some of Mr. Morrow's other books are better, but I would think twice before picking up a copy of this book. And the fact that this book earned a six-figure advance, while I certainly think 99% of writers of literary fiction are underpaid and am all for sizeable advancements, the amount spent on this book and marketing it can only take away money that could otherwise be spent on more deserving books.

Set in a richly described but unnamed Western town, the lead character, Grant, comes home to visit his aunt and uncle who live there. He is in his early thirties, divorcing his wife, and looking for a place he can call home. His aunt and uncle have been receiving mysterious night visits by someone setting out to intimidate them, and the book's intention is to unravel this mystery.

The title, Giovanni's Gift, refers to a cigar box full of mementos that Giovanni, a friend of the uncle, leaves behind when he dies. The reader immediately suspects there was a murder.

The box is an allegory to Pandora's box and as Grant discovers the meaning of each item in the box, the story becomes more complex, especially since Grant falls in love with Giovanni's daughter.

The preservation of the land is another subplot and the author constantly veers off the story with poetic metaphorical language to make this point over and over again. I do have to applaud the author though for his skill with words and for having whatever it took to be recognized in the publishing world. I think he says a few important things about the environment. But I just couldn't stay awake.

The best book I've read on the best general ever.

Andy Johnson

This biography made me wish to meet the famous Hannibal. The research is well done and now I have a good understanding of the role Hannibal played in this period of history. The only reason I gave this book a 4 is because it was a little on the dry side. That may be due to the reader's voice as I listened to the cassette, or because there just wasn't enough "heart and soul" in the telling of the history. That is, I learned tons about Hannibal's military movements, strategies, battles, etc., but a very minute amount about his character and feelings. This is probably not the author's fault, however, because he refers to the ancient sources as not passing down much about Hannibal's character for us to draw from.

It wasn't until the last chapter or two that I felt I was starting to get to know Hannibal as a man, with references about his wit, humor, and his sly ability to sneak away unnoticed as he was hounded by the Romans. At the end, we are treated to a few of his quotes which give us a little glimpse into his personality. At that point I began wishing I knew more about him, felt a certain empathy with him, and wondered if by the end of his life, he felt he had thrown it away in a useless cause. The author reflects on this a bit, and concludes that even if Hannibal and Carthage had won this war against the Romans, it really wouldn't have changed history that much, rather it would only have slowed the Romans down for a little while. I agreed with that conclusion, and not only felt sorry for Hannibal, but sorry for the human mind that causes us to slaughter one another for .... what?

In spite of the occasional dryness of the telling, I was fascinated by the information presented about Hannibal's career and the political and military setting of the nations involved. I appreciate having this knowledge.

Nice book. Well written, based on good sources, and about one of the most exciting historical figures of all times. Even long after his death, one cannot underestimate Hannibal. Hannibal should have been one of the characters in the 1988 film "Bill and Teds Excellent Adventures."

Hannibal by Ernle Bradford is a fine and enjoyable read about the history of the Second Punic War, with a principal focus on Hannibal's invasion of Italy and the subsequent 17 year occupation. It is obvious that the author is an admirer of Hannibal, and a grudging admirer of Rome. In some ways Hannibal is treated as a almost mythic character who not only was a military genius but attempted to fight a noble war. The Romans, on the other hand, are portrayed as devious, untrustworthy with their only saving graces being their perseverance and ability to eventually adapt to the superior abilities of Hannibal.

The book greatest failures lie in the descriptions of the major battles, especially Cannae. One of the greatest military feats of history is dealt with in a few pages. While Bradford does describe the basics of the battle, he does so in a very perfunctory manner. The same is true for the other major engagements. Further, the almost total lack of maps makes the battles and the troop movements difficult to follow.

The strength of the book is in the description of how the Romans eventually prevailed and Hannibal's miscalculations of the Roman persistence. After the destruction of up to 70,000 troops at Cannae, and numerous legions prior to the battle, most empires would have crumbled. Rome did not. The reasons for Rome's survival is the best reason to read this book.

Informative without being too technical in a military sense. Major battles were covered, but not in minute detail; which I often find boring. Overall strategies are covered without the step by step walkthrough of each battle.
Not really knowing a lot of specifics about Hannibal, I thought this was a very good book to start off with. I had read Bradford's work on Thermopylae and liked that. Hannibal is similar in style. It is obvious that Bradford admires Hannibal, but he balances that out with an almost equal admiration of the Roman's ability to withstand and ultimately defeat him. I came away a little surprised with a sense that Hannibal had a great sense of humor and that he realized his attempt to break Rome was in vain fairly early in the effort. It is probably that, in the end, which I like about Bradford's style - particularly in this book; I have much more of a sense of who Hannibal was than just reading a history of Hannibal.

Classic work on Theory of Mind and its importance in understanding autism, Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism. Understandable and readable. Good diagrams and models.

This book is based on past research, as it should be. The ideas in it, however, seem formulated for the topic. The arguments for and against the author's theory are both convincing, but arguments in favor of the author's theory read like there is a slight bias behind them.

All in all, though, this book is excellent because the author does an excellent job of explaining a topic that has little or no definition.

If you are one who is interested in theories instead of applied research/information, this book is for you. Baron-Cohen is 'way out there' with this theory using a psychological approach.

This is an excellent and fascinating description of the way the mind/brain works. I could not put it down!

I rely on customer reviews when deciding on a book. Apparently the three reviews I read that appeared to be helpful turned out to be a disappointment. This book is obviously written for someone with a very extensive vocabulary. It is filled with $10.00 words and ideas that are really hard to decipher. I was under the impression, via the other 3 reviews, that this book would provide an explanation of "mindblindness" in terms the average layman could understand. After reading the first two chapters, I had to go back and read them again and again. I suggest you try to find this one at the public library before you decide to permenantly add it to you own personal collection. Save your money and the shipping charges.

For a critical review of this book and of the whole of Leyton's work you may profitably read
'A Critique of Leyton's Theory of Perception and Cognition. Review of Symmetry, Causality, Mind, by Michael Leyton.'
by Hendrickx M. and Wagemans J. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Volume 43, Number 2, June 1999, pp. 314-345.
It may save you a lot of money. If you can't find the paper just contact me at marcel.hendrickx@chello.be . I'll be glad to inform you.

First off, let me begin by saying that this book was bought not for pleasure, but for the author's Cognitive Science class at Rutgers University. You may read reviews of Mr. Leyton's class at www.ratemyprofessor.com (NJ>Rutgers University--New Brunswick>Leyton, Michael). I am admitting this because my experience in the class--I did very well grade-wise but despised the author's King of the World attitude--may have biased my review, though I will try to be impartial.

The book explores Leyton's theories on cognitive awareness and development, and heavy emphasis was placed on his idea that the mind (in all forms of life, including experiment rats) constantly seeks out not just novel stimuli, but *complex* stimuli. I found that many of his supporting arguments seemed at first to be convincing, until I read the footnotes. Many of the experiments he references were performed by him and his collegues. I have never seen an author cite himself so many times in an academic text. That was enough to irk me, but then I researched the other experiments he cites both in the book and in his class and found that he often just whips explanations out of his rear and credits the support of his ideas to concrete experiments, rather than his own muddled memory of those experiments' conclusions.

Allow me to explain. One of his central arguments is that without available complexity, a person will either make their own complexity or die. His support of this idea is that an experiment was performed with orphaned infants kept in cribs with white sheets and white walls, many of whom died, he claims, from lack of stimulation. Further research on my part revealed that the infants died from poor care and the plights of orphans everywhere. Many were neglected in an environment where, since a World War was going on, there were too many orphans and not enough care-takers. Moreover, many of the orphans were ill to begin with, and died that way. The experiment was (obviously) never repeated in a clinical setting, so the data can't be taken in without a grain of salt. The fact that the orphans were surrounded by white sheets should hardly be taken to be the cause of death, except when trying to prove a theory with little supporting evidence. Michael Leyton often takes things out of context to support his own ideas, a plot that would land him out of favor with many higher up in the academic heirarchy were he to carry his pompous-professor attitude to his collegues (apparently, this superiority complex extends only to his students).

It would not be so bad to make up false, unsupported conclusions to support one's ideas were this not an academic text. As it is, I was shocked.

Additionally, Leyton seems to be trying to put himself on a higher level by using ridiculously complicated sentences and unnecessarily hard vocabulary as part of his writing style. I know that this is a college text, but we've been taught that when writing a scientific text, one should strive to make it accessible to all levels, the better to foster further inquiry and thought.

Nevertheless, if you take away all his bogus supportive evidence, his holy-high-chair attitude, and just leave the ideas he presents, you have a very thought-provoking text that would hopefully lead to further inquiry into the relationship between complexity and cognitive development. This is why it gets two stars instead of zero.

I would recommend that you buy the book and review it for yourself, after carefully researching his "evidence".

Leyton is an extraordinary great innovator. I had the same sensation when reading his work as I did when reading Newton's Principia: "Everything changes here!" This book is a basic introduction to his revolutionary theory of geometry in which he completely inverts mathematics for the last 3000 years. He makes mathematics the study of history, as opposed to the study of the non-historical which he shows has been the basis of mathematics since its origins in ancient Greece. His mathematical innovations are now of enormous interest in large-scale manufacturing industries including the aerospace industry in which I work. I discovered him as a result of hearing his talk at Boeing aircraft. I started by reading his innovative work on software structure, which is of great interest to us dealing with legacy systems. This lead me to his reformulation of the foundations of mathematics. Then I also discovered that he is not just a mathematician, cognitive scientist, software theorist, roboticist, etc., but also a highly respected painter, sculptor, architectural designer, composer, etc. A truly universal mind. There is no doubt that he will be studied in 2000 years just like Plato is studied today. Innovators of this magnitude are rare, and their work never looses interest. They change the directions that whole civilizations take.

This book has such enormous power that it will clearly change the course of Western civilization. Leyton is one of the greatest thinkers of all time. In terms of his achievements in all the sciences and arts, he is unique in world history - an individual who has revolutionized several disciplines simultaneously and several arts - painting, music architecture. One constantly hears the word genius about him. But this might be an understatement. He seems to be a phenomenon that has never existed before - an individual who is a genius in all disciplines at the same time. A mind like this completely defies all limits.

I heard someone describe the Nobel-prize winning scientist Richard Feynman as an extraordinary genius as opposed to an ordinary genius. The distinction was that, whereas an ordinary genius is an enormously talented version of an ordinary person, an extraordinary genius is in a completely different category. It is simply impossible to add enough talent to an ordinary person to get an extraordinary genius. Their minds and entire existences are constructed differently.

This is obviously the case with Leyton. Yet if one compares him with Richard Feynman, one finds that Feynman worked within a well-established paradigm, making extraordinary contributions to it and expanding it, whereas Leyton entirely invents the paradigm. Indeed he seems to have invented 20 paradigms. At the root of this is his extraordinary unification of all knowledge. Indeed, in his books, he seems to be the first person to actually understand what knowledge is.

His entire theory is a theory of knowledge: what it is to know. It is as a result of being able to answer this question, that he is able to enter any scientific and artistic discipline and completely revolutionize it.

This book is for those who want to live a conscious life and know what consciousness is at the same time. It is the first and only book to explain consciousness.

The book has an endless monumental depth. It will clearly be read in 2000 years, just like Plato and Socrates are read millennia after their time. It changes everything from the ground up. It wipes aside all the ideas of Western philosophy, and replaces them with an intellectual monument that completely re-builds human thought.

This is simply the greatest book I have ever read. Put aside your Hegel, Kant, Hume, etc. Leyton is far greater than all of them.

Leyton's profound ideas are used in an enormous number of disciplines. For example, a theorem he proved while a student is now used in over 40 scientific disciplines. Physicists are now describing him as being responsible for the next great revolution in physics. In fact, he has published deep original work on the foundations of nuclear physics, the structure of African languages, robotics, the psychology of human perception, computer-aided design, the foundations of geometry, etc. He is clearly one of a handful of truly great geniuses of human history. It is quite shocking to have such an individual as a contemporary. Like being born at the same time as Leonardo da Vinci. It is well-known that he studied university physics at the age of 6, and won a national painting competition at the age of 10, and wrote his first Mahler-length symphony at the age of 12, won presidential award from the White House. His book, Symmetry Causality Mind, in MIT Press, was greeted at first with enormous controversy. At the time (14 years ago), I was working at MIT, and I remember a tremendous "buzz" in the corridors about the book. People would either condemn the book or praise it as one of the great books of human thought. Recently I attended a talk of Leyton's in the architecture department at MIT, and the almost unanimous opinion was that it was one of the most exhilarating and popular talks in the department's history. People could not stop talking about it for weeks.