The Astral: A Novel

The Astral: A Novel by Kate Christensen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Astral is all about experiencing life as it is, and everything from the plot, to characters, setting, and writing style beautifully convey the novel's theme. The book is set in Brooklyn. Having lived there, I felt Christensen did an excellent job of capturing the texture of real daily life in the borough. Her protagonist, a poet, prides himself on the fact that his poetry celebrates reality, that the only way he knows to live is by honestly, fully experiencing the reality of his days. The crisis at the beginning of the novel (getting kicked out by his wife in retribution for an affair he did not have) sets him on the path to discovering that he has been avoiding certain parts of his daily experience, building a fantasy of family life and marriage that either never existed or had already collapsed by the arrival of the crisis. Christensen's characters are are real and three dimensional, although a few (particularly James) feel more like foils for the protagonist and tools of the narrative than living breathing people.

Best of all, I love the ending of this book. There is a climax, a definitive ending to the story between the protagonist and his relationship to the life he believed he was living. But the denouement (where many books fall flat for me) is a beautiful admission that our experience is a delicate balance between the stories we tell ourselves, and our perception of the nuts and bolts of the world around us, which have their own transcendent radiance, no matter how well-worn or shabby.



View all my reviews

Incognito

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Incognito started out strong as a generalist's introduction to recent advances in the study of cognition. The author's enthusiasm for his subject was contagious, and he wrote with a great balance between explaining the subject and illustrating points with interesting case studies. Near the end of the book the author's thesis veered from general interest in cognition, to a passionate case for altering the criminal justice system. The end of the book really went wild, becoming more and more off tone and off topic from earlier chapters.



Eagleman explored the justice system by making an interesting case for punishment based on reformability instead of culpability. He began with extreme examples of brain damaged criminals physically incapable of controlling their violent behavior, and stated that it was cruel to punish such criminals, as they were not able to change their own behavior in response to the punishment. So far, so good.



Then my skin began to crawl as Eagleman extended the definition of brain damage to include criminals who had genetic tendencies toward depression, had suffered lead poisoning as children, or were raised in abusive households. The goosebumps did not come from the idea of a society in which crime goes unpunished- Eagleman was careful to state he intended to contain and/or behaviorally recondition all offenders to protect the general populace. I was creeped out by the broad definition of brain damage (nearly any history of physical or emotional trauma of significance qualifies you as brain damaged by Eagleman's definition). And if a criminal is identified as brain damaged, the idea of their correctional reconditioning was also creepy and ill-defined. The lobotomy as correctional reconditioning, Eagleman concluded, was no longer a socially acceptable form of reconditioning. That leaves correctional therapists with drugs and other shadowy brain reprogramming techniques to reshape criminal brains. Yikes.



Further, Eagleman hopefully anticipated a future when brain scans are used during sentencing to help determine the extent of a criminal's brain damage. Based on the scan, the criminal would be diverted to either punishment, correctional behavioral reconditioning, or indefinite containment. Eagleman claimed that taking the human element out of sentencing, and replacing it with science, would take the cruelty out of the justice system and make it more efficient. I think his hope for the future looks like a nightmare scenario rife with potential for abuse. The best biometric scans of the future will provide a stream of information that will be interpreted by human brain scientists, or by programs written by human brain scientists. That means the human element would still be alive and well, rife with prejudice, corruption, self-interest, and pressure from exigency (hmm, these results could go either way, but our reconditioning facility is overcrowded...). And the worst part would be, the justice system and our whole society would be pretending that we were perfectly impartial, purely scientific. Giving human foibles the face of absolute, impartial legitimacy is a dangerous, frightening, and downright threatening vision of a future criminal justice system.



And to end this book with a truly crazy bang, Eagleman knocked Occam's Razor, and made some pretty broad claims about science in general that I don't have the scientific background to agree with or dispute. But the remarks seemed quite off topic and out of keeping with the rest of the the book.



View all my reviews

Murder Past Due

Murder Past Due by Miranda James

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Maine Coons seem to be popular cats in fiction these days. This was a cozy whodunnit featuring a librarian and his Maine Coon cat. While the amateur detective's library skills were key to his ability to help solve the mystery, the Maine Coon cat was not. I expect the cat in a feline mystery series to be integral to the plot. Take the cat out of Murder Past Due, and you still have the exact same story.



View all my reviews