On The Brain
Spring 1995 Volume 4, Number 2

BOOKSHELF

COLD SNAP by Thom Jones (228pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1995. $19.95) Few writers try (and fewer succeed) to give the brain a dramatic, explicit role in shaping fictional characters and their fates. Jones succeeds in this new collection of short stories. Protagonists and antagonists in his tales are defined to a large extent by their struggles with, or subordination to, manic-depression, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy from brain damage, alcohol, opium, and nicotine. Admiring Cold Snap in her New York Times Book Review report, Joyce Carol Oates writes that the book "forces us to realize how rarely the mysterious life of the body is evoked in literature."

AGING: A Natural History by Robert E. Ricklefs and Caleb E. Finch (256 pp. NY: Scientific American Library, 1995. $32.95) Ricklefs, professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Finch, Professor in the Neurobiology of Aging at the University of Southern California, explore contemporary theories of the mechanisms of aging in humans and other species and reflect on the implications for lengthening the human lifespan.

THE ENGINE OF REASON, THE SEAT OF THE SOUL: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain by Paul M. Churchland (330 pp. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. $29.95) Churchland, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, takes neurobiology as the point of departure for his hope to make "a conceptual framework of sufficient richness and integrity that you will be able to reconceive at least some of your own mental life" across a broad spectrum of issues in law, education, public policy and private morality.

EYE, BRAIN AND VISION by David H. Hubel, M.D. (240 pp. NY: Scientific American Library, 1995. $19.95) A new paperback reprint, with updates, of the 1987 book exploring the physiology of the visual system and how the brain processes visual information, by Hubel, Nobel laureate and Harvard Medical School Professor of Neurobiology.

Table of Contents