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What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything (2009)

by John Brockman(Favorite Author)

3.73 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0061686549 (ISBN13: 9780061686542)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Harper Perennial

review 1: I keep reading reviews of how provocative these essays are, and my only response to these people is: you need to get out more--or maybe stay inside and read more books. While there are some good reads in the collection, the vast majority of these essays retread familiar themes from the choir of new-Atheist intellectuals (there is no god; yea, science!; beware, climate change). Before a new-atheist jumps out of a laboratory and assaults me: I am not claiming that the ideas in the book are inferior or wrong, only that there is very little here that is suprising, provocative, or different from anything I've read from these folks before. One would think these qualities would be especially apparent in a book titled, "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?" Anthologies like this... more are a great introduction to some wonderful contemporary thinkers for the uninitiated, and I particularly enjoyed the essays from Joseph Ledoux, Nicholas Carr, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Donald Hoffman, Timothy Taylor, Robert Sapolsky, Tor Norretranders, Helen Fisher, Linda Stone, Alison Gopnik, and Jamsheed Bharucha. But be warned--even for those who are unfamiliar with these thinkers, there is an irritating rhythm of self-righteousness and in-group thinking that beats through this book, and it quickly becomes tiresome.
review 2: Thinking's optional in this world. Most of the ordinary problems of life have been solved in the past 50 years ("I wonder what my cousing in Australia had for breakfast today?" "Oh, eggs..."When I can be bothered to think, I usually decide what I think then stick to my position as if I were defending Stalingrad. I learned this in business school.This book represents the best of a better kind of intelligence. less

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