BOOKSHELF

Summer 1996 Volume 5, Number 3

NIETZSCHE: A novel by David Farrell Krell. (State University of New York Press, Albany, 1996. 380 pp., $18.95 paperback; $57.50 hardcover). The author, a professor of Philosophy at DePaul University uses medical reports, Nietzsche's works, and actual letters to bring to life fictionally the last 10 years of one of Europe's greatest philosophers -- the years of Nietzsche's paralysis and descent into madness.

DARWIN'S BASS: The Evolutionary Psychology of Fishing Man, by Paul Quinnett (Keokee Co. Publishing, 1996. 257 pp., $25) Just in time for summer, the psychologist, fisherman, and Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the University of Washington School of Medicine returns with a sequel to his popular Pavlov's Trout (reviewed in On The Brain, Summer `94). Here he uses the sport and Darwin's own passion for it to examine how "something we call a brain produces something we call a mind."

DARWIN'S BLACK BOX: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution by Michael J. Behe (Free Press, NY, 1996. 336 pp., $25). A brawl around the barbecue is a nice way to shake off summer torpor, and the author, a Lehigh University biochemistry professor offers the opportunity: His thesis is that molecular science is putting Darwin's theory to a stiff test -- at least the gradualism part of it. He wonders if Nature was, in fact, designed (the publishers stress that he is not arguing creationism), but his real accomplishment is a highly readable tour of genetics and molecular biology, though the brain gets only passing attention.

DRUGS AND THE BRAIN by Solomon H. Snyder (Scientific American Library, NY, 1996. 228 pp., 148 illustrations; paperback). This 1986 classic by Snyder, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine neuroscientist and one of the leading investigators of how drugs influence the brain, has been newly updated and revised. Readable by the non-specialist, the book includes chapters on opiates (as both pain-relievers and drugs of abuse), drugs for schizophrenia, mood modifiers, stimulants, anxiety drugs and psychedelics.

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