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A review by lalalena
Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
3.0
I started this book in the spring and I found myself tearing through sections and then struggling through others.
And then the Jonah Lehrer borrowing/plagiarism/inaccurate sourcing scandal started, when I only had one chapter left to read(the one on Virginia Woolf) and the epilogue (titled Coda). This whole ordeal has marred my experience with this chapter that I was looking so forward to--I mean, I love Virginia Woolf! Mrs. Dalloway was one of the formative literary works in my life! What a bummer.
Divorced from the (it appears accurate) accusations hurled at Lehrer, the book is a good one. Some chapters are fantastic--namely the Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Igor Stravinsky--and the rest are mostly OK. The notable exception here being the Paul Cezanne chapter which was tedious and boring because for some reason, the argument simply doesn't translate without photos. This is odd, of course, because I couldn't taste any of the food Lehrer describe in the August Escoffier chapter but somehow this is simply the case.
Anyway, I am definitely interested in the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. I just wish the author were more...trustworthy.
And then the Jonah Lehrer borrowing/plagiarism/inaccurate sourcing scandal started, when I only had one chapter left to read(the one on Virginia Woolf) and the epilogue (titled Coda). This whole ordeal has marred my experience with this chapter that I was looking so forward to--I mean, I love Virginia Woolf! Mrs. Dalloway was one of the formative literary works in my life! What a bummer.
Divorced from the (it appears accurate) accusations hurled at Lehrer, the book is a good one. Some chapters are fantastic--namely the Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Igor Stravinsky--and the rest are mostly OK. The notable exception here being the Paul Cezanne chapter which was tedious and boring because for some reason, the argument simply doesn't translate without photos. This is odd, of course, because I couldn't taste any of the food Lehrer describe in the August Escoffier chapter but somehow this is simply the case.
Anyway, I am definitely interested in the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. I just wish the author were more...trustworthy.