From an interview in American Scientist
What books are you currently reading (or have you just finished reading) for your work or for pleasure? Why did you choose them, and what do you think of them?
The History of Force, by James Payne (Lytton, 2003), an obscure but fascinating book which documents how—contrary to popular opinion—violence has steadily declined in the West over the past few centuries. Torture, genocide, murders, deadly riots and slavery used to be the rule, not the exception. If we could identify and bottle the causes of this massive trend, we could live in an even less violent world. The Last Word, by Thomas Nagel (Oxford University Press, 1997), which defends the objective reality of reason and ethics by noting that any defense of relativism refutes itself by the very act of saying that relativism is correct or good. Brazzaville Beach, by William Boyd (W. Morrow, 1990), a clever novel about a primatologist who observes deadly violence in her chimpanzees and has to deal with the wrath of the project leader, who has just published a book called The Peaceful Primate. It’s an example of one of my favorite genres—novels in which one character is a cognitive scientist caught up in great themes of literature that are also themes of the sciences of mind, such as reason, emotion, free will, consciousness and memory. Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem (Random House, 1983) features a witty young philosopher who grapples with that problem both as a research topic and in her own attractions to the cerebral and the carnal. David Lodge’s Thinks … (Viking, 2001) explores the different ways that consciousness is understood in art and science through an affair between an English professor and a cognitive scientist. Other examples are Richard Dooling’s Brain Storm (Random House, 1998), Carole Cadwalladr’s forthcoming The Family Tree (Dutton, 2005), Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (Thorndike Press, 1998), Michael Frayn’s The Tin Men (Little, Brown, 1965) and Ann Bernays’s Professor Romeo (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989).
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