People once thought the seat of our souls was in the heart, Kean points out, and now we look for it in the brain. Many of the topics Kean covers have been written about before - amnesia, phantom limbs, Vermonter Phineas Gage and his iron tamping rod - but he proves an able guide, connecting each story with the science behind it, always with an air of enthusiastic curiosity. Kean, whose last book found human narratives behind every two-letter abbreviation in the periodic table, does the same service here to the history of our understanding of the human brain. Taking its title from the doctors who attended King Henri II after his fatal 1559 joisting accident, this book is appropriately both entertaining and gory (it begins and ends with brain injuries that involved pierced eye sockets). THE TALE OF THE DUELING NEUROSURGEONS: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery “There are so many forms of female nonexistence,” she writes, but she takes heart in the new generation, calling young feminists “a thrilling phenomenon” and hoping, too, for a time when men will pull their weight in the task of liberation. Solnit, who has previously taken on aesthetics, politics, and the environment, here focuses on women’s survival, whether from an epidemic of violence or from more genteel forms of silencing and erasure. This slim book - seven essays, punctuated by enigmatic, haunting paintings by Ana Teresa Fernandez - hums with power and wit. Both sexes, she writes, can be rude know-it-alls, but “the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered.” Solnit doesn’t feel uniquely, personally oppressed by such experiences, she goes on, but she’s outraged that women still face a battle “to be treated like human beings” in everything from the cultural arena to the justice system. The book’s author, it turns out, was Solnit herself - a fact that took the man several minutes to fully grasp. In the title essay, Solnit recounts the time a rich, older man began telling her about a “very important” book on the subject they were discussing. Haymarket, 130 pp., illustrated, paperback, $11.95
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