Didn't fire my synapses
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Calvin's "How Brains Think" makes a reader realize how thankful he or she should be for Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan -- brilliant scientists who can express brilliant thoughts in clear, simple language without resorting to gimcracks that supposedly reassure the lay reader. Calvin's book is relentlessly choppy -- some segments are literally only two paragraphs long -- a strategy possibly suggested by an editor nervous about keeping readers attuned. This is unfortunate: The subject matter is fascinating. For that matter, it's so fascinating that Calvin could have stood not only to spin out his information into clear, sustained chapters -- go ahead, we can take it; we bought the book, didn't we? -- but also to have decided what his point was going to be. He dismisses quantum physicists' ideas about how brains work without telling us what those ideas are. He ambles constantly between morphology, his vacation cruise to Alaska, long and too-frequent quotes from snappier writers, more musing about fjords and rock-throwing (oh, and those awful, cryptic graphics), and references to his other (and presumably better-fleshed-out) books. Popular-science writing: not for the timid.
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Needs editing, seems dashed-off.
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Strikes me more like a first draft. Disorganized; supposedly
aimed at an introductory audience (according to the jacket)
but if I hadn't just finished Dennet's Darwin's Dangerous
Idea, many of the allusions (which are typically unexplained)
would have gone completely over my head. A second-rate effort
for someone with Calvin's credentials.
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