my mind on books

Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd (University of Auckland) in “The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature” suggests that “Art is a form of cognitive play with pattern….” (The article mentions an upcoming book called On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction but it doesn’t appear to be in the “pre-order” stage yet.)

I’m familiar with Clay Shirky as the author of “Ontology Is Overrated” a great essay on folksonomy, so I’m interested in his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which also has a related blog.

“Wikiphobia and Web 2.0” in the Telegraph (22/03/2008) calls Shirky’s book “as crisply argued and as enlightening a book about the internet as has been written.”

3/31/08 New York Times: “We Want It, and Waiting Is Not an Option”

Intriguing books found around the Sci Am office… is intrigued by A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought by Stephen Kern (Princeton University Press, 2004) – “Search Inside” available at Amazon.

From the book description:

Kern identifies five shifts in thinking about causality, shifts toward increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty. He argues that the more researchers learned about the causes of human behavior, the more they realized how much more there was to know and how little they knew about what they thought they knew.

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle (3/16/08) has an interview with Tom Wolfe, discussing “surprisingly trendy neuroscience.” According to the article Wolfe is working on a book on the topic, to be called The Human Beast.

Wolfe’s 1996 essay “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” referred to in the article, is reprinted here.

Wolfe’s 2006 Jefferson Lecture is “The Human Beast.”

Jose Delgado’s “Physical Control of the Mind,” recommended by Wolfe, is available online here

Courtesy of philipkdickfans.com: