talonsontypewriters's reviews
313 reviews

could have been super good, but badly needed another round or two of edits

deeply obnoxiously overwritten prose and a lot of pointless tangents, but somewhere beneath that is some interesting information about whales and the environment

fun! like most cosmic horror, beautifully grotesque but sometimes a little too incomprehensible and disjointed

One of my personal dislikes is when nonfiction is written in a style so quippy and casual that it tends to overpower any actual theses, and that's definitely the case here. The footnotes make it particularly apparent, occasionally providing additional useful information and occasionally just talking about Sapolsky's life or lack of knowledge about something he's just written (why did you even say it, then?), but it pervades the main body as well. It's nice to know that even seasoned researchers can be impressed by other work in their field, but interjecting a "whoa" or "mind-boggling" after describing every mildly interesting study gets very grating very fast.

I'm not sure how trustworthy some of that work even is, either. A lot of studies referenced have been debunked or criticized -- I rolled my eyes at the reference to menstrual synchrony -- and aside from a few exceptions, little acknowledgment is given to any controversy. Results from studies are also often presented without their statistical significance, surrounding context, or experimental design. Normally, I would trust that the author verified the conditions and relevance for themself beforehand, but considering how many famously unreplicable or otherwise flawed experiments are described here, I can't quite keep from being skeptical. Perhaps Sapolsky didn't want to bog the text down with "unnecessary" technical information laypeople would have to slog through, but surely there is a way to convey how a study was conducted and can be interpreted without getting into that level of detail.

To be honest, my maximum potential enjoyment was already weakened by the introduction, which quickly groups schizophrenia in with cancer, AIDS, and global warming as "unambiguously bad news" to be "eradicated." An odd attitude is generally taken toward neurodivergence -- despite neurobiology and behavior being the key focus, psychiatric disorders are dismissed as "[not] terribly relevant to the concerns of this book." Strange no matter what, but especially when there's an entire chapter about empathy that dedicates only one paragraph to how experiences can vary in autistic people (with no mention of other disorders), and even then pretty much just says what biological (dys)function deficient cognitive empathy probably doesn't directly correlate to. There's also a passing description of autism and ADHD as "male dominant diseases," and OCD is reduced to a "displaced need to impose cleanliness and order."

Then there's the constant repetition, seeming both sides-ing of colonization, and slide into staunch determinism. For someone who's studied a decent amount of biology and psychology, much of the information here just feels like retreading old ground, and what is new and interesting I think I could have learned from a shorter, more reliable source.