All Reviews
Reviews are listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent review appearing first in the list.
The Beast of Cretacea
Ishmael lives with his brother and foster parents in the Black Range on Earth where the Shroud hangs over everything. Storms rage so hard the only way to…
The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche
Please imagine this conversation between Plato and Nietzsche. Plato has just finished reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. He paces the…
The Nordic Theory of Everything
Partanen is a Finnish journalist who met an American man and moved to the USA to be with him. She loved many aspects of life in America, but she also fou…
The Second Girl
Frank Marr used to be a police detective, but he took early retirement. He has a bad drug habit and he is struggling with his moral standards. He wants t…
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Two Great Problems of Learning
There are potentially two ways of reading Two Great Problems. The first is as a clarion call to a particular re-structuring of academia. The sec…
“Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People”
The issue of guns in America causes people in other parts of the developed world to look at our country and shake their heads. – from the…
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A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities
Professor Sorensen (PS) sets himself up, duly following Borges, electing a predecessor and ending with an elegy, (“Fame as the Forgotten Philosopher”, th…
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Addiction
Candice L Shelby’s monograph provides a new, empirically informed, philosophical account of addiction that sheds light to the lives of addicted individua…
Addictions
It is often difficult to find a comprehensive overview of current addiction research that encompasses more than one perspective in an in-depth and carefu…
Behaving
Kenneth Schaffner’s Behaving: What’s Genetic, What’s Not, and Why Should We Care? is a thorough, in-depth discussion of contemporary scien…
Cerebrum 2015
I love the Dana Press, and I always love books in this series, this one with a foreword from Alan Leshner and contributions from some of the best in the…
Disorientation and Moral Life
Exciting, challenging, and innovative thinking is found in recent feminist and critical race theory, and Ami Harbin’s new book, Disorientation and Mo…
Evil in Modern Thought
In 2015, Princeton University Press published a new “classics” edition of Susan Neiman’s remarkable book, Evil in Modern Thought. This version c…
Imagine Me Gone
Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone is one of the best novels about mental illness in recent decades. It is intellectually ambitious, compassionate but sh…
It Takes One
Audrey Harte is a forensic psychologist who lives in Los Angeles and is a TV crime celebrity-expert. She returns to Maine to see her old best friend Magg…
Motivation and Cognitive Control
If you find it odd to combine these two facilities, then think of this: we might regard a person who does not focus ardently and diligently as someone wh…
Ordinarily Well
In Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants, psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer presents an exhaustively researched history of the development of…
Oxford Handbook of Psychiatric Ethics
This formidable two volume work comprises ten sections of ninety-four articles. And these two volumes have as their “sister volume, the O…
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Science Fiction and Philosophy
Can you be sure that you are not in a computer simulation ? Are we on the verge of an era where machines will become exponentially more intelligent than…
Silence is Goldfish
This is the third young adult novel by British author Annabel Pitcher, and it may not translate so well to American readers, both because of some of the…
The Age of Genius
Anthony Grayling’s The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind has two main goals, the first, an “official” inte…
The Last Mile
There’s something about Baldacci’s writing style that announces the work is down to earth, an easy read and with little demands on the reader. The plot m…
The Origins of Fairness
Who hasn’t got a view about tax policies? Or on reproductive rights? As Nick Enfield puts it in the foreword to Origins of Fairness “we are seld…
The Spirit of Tibetan Buddhism
Tibetan Buddhism has an estimated ten to twenty million adherents worldwide, and yet people generally know little about the tradition apart from recogniz…
The Virtues of Happiness
There exist many books addressing the link between the moral life and the happy life, which is hardly surprising given the amount of attention and effort…