New York review books collections

Searle reviews selected works of six prominent consciousness researchers (two philosophers, three neurobiologists, and one mathematician). Two chapters, bracketing the others, represent his own views. I find the title a hair misleading. Searle generally purports to be a naturalist rather than a mysterian. By mystery, he merely means the question, how exactly does the brain cause the mind? A majority of the book deals with analyzing the faults of the other authors rather than directly addressing this question. By the end of the book, we are maybe one tiny increment closer to an understanding of the problem. The most entertaining parts of the book are Searle's dialogues with the two philosophers, Dennett and Chalmers. But Searle's sympathies lie more with the neurobiologists. At least two of the three neurobiological accounts are highly speculative, and are perhaps likely to be shortly rendered obsolete except as historical footnotes. But they at least give a peek as to what Searle might regard as the right flavor of account. That is, once you strip them of obvious philosophical errors.

The legacy of World War II and the complicated and very different ways Germany and Japan have dealt with it.

Essays by Oliver Sacks, Jonathan Miller, Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel J. Kevles, & R.C. Lewontin explore forgotten and neglected aspects of the history of science.

Theater of Cruelty has three main themes that frequently overlap: war, film, and the visual arts. Many of the movies discussed are about war and violence, often related to World War II, and more specifically deal with the two nations that unleashed the war, Germany and Japan: why they did what they did, and how they came to terms with it afterward or didn't. Other essays in the collection, about the diaries of Harry Kessler and Anne Frank, the bombing of German cities, Japan's kamikaze pilots further explore these themes. Many of the artists discussed by Buruma were German or Japanese, including Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Tsuguharu Foujita, as were the filmmakers Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, all of whom were affected in one way or another by fascism and its terrible consequences. Theater of Cruelty is less about war itself than the way people deal with violence and cruelty, in the arts and in life.--Amazon.com.

"A New York Review Books collection"--Cover.