- Hardcover: 448 pages
- Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (9 Oct 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 030014878X
- ISBN-13: 978-0300148787
- Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 16 x 5.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 181,045 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Master and His Emissary
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'...shows convincingly that the degeneracy of the West springs from our failure to manage the binary divisions of our brains.'
--David Cox, Evening Standard Books of the Year, 19th November 2009
`A landmark new book ... it tells a story you need to hear, of where we live now.'
--Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times 'Culture', 29th November 2009
'Few books this year can match this one in breadth of erudition, scope, and ambition ... a highly stimulating read.' --'Best Books of 2009' choice, Barnes & Noble
'A scintillating intelligence.' --The Economist
`This is a very remarkable book...clear, penetrating, lively, thorough and fascinating...splendidly thought-provoking... I couldn't put it down.' --Professor Mary Midgley, The Guardian
'...beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous...tells us about...rapidly evolving technologies and experimental work in fascinating and lucid detail.'
--Professor AC Grayling, Literary Review
'...beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous...as if it were an adventure story... Absorbing and fascinating."
--A.C. Grayling, Literary Review, 1st December 2009
`...remarkable... McGilchrist's explanation of such oddities in terms of our divided nature is clear, penetrating, lively, thorough and fascinating.'
--Mary Midgley, Guardian, 2nd January 2010
`...splendidly thought-provoking. And I do have to say that, fat though it is, I couldn't put it down.'
--The London Review Bookshop, London Review of Books, February 2010
`...while the book develops an argument it is also a treasure chest of fascinating detail and memorable quotation.'
--Adam Zeman, Standpoint, 1st March 2010
`Twenty years in the making, this seminal book has been well worth the wait.'
--David Lorimer, Scientific Medical Network, Winter 2010
'McGilchrist is a remarkable person...he writes lucidly...Voices such as McGilchrist are essential.' --Salley Vickers, Daily Telegraph
'McGilchrist writes well, with a direct engaging style...This is a very good book, both informative and erudite.' --Ian Gibbins, Australian Book Review
'McGilchrist...persuasively argues that our society is suffering from an over-dominant left hemisphere losing touch with its natural regulative 'master,' the right.' --Salley Vicker, The Guardian
'McGilchrist, for whom certainty is the greatest of illusions, has produced an absolutely convincing narrative of who we are.' --Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph
'This book is a dazzling achievement...Just as a read, it's an immense pleasure.' --Charles Foster, Contemporary Review
--David Cox, Evening Standard Books of the Year, 19th November 2009
`A landmark new book ... it tells a story you need to hear, of where we live now.'
--Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times 'Culture', 29th November 2009
'Few books this year can match this one in breadth of erudition, scope, and ambition ... a highly stimulating read.' --'Best Books of 2009' choice, Barnes & Noble
'A scintillating intelligence.' --The Economist
`This is a very remarkable book...clear, penetrating, lively, thorough and fascinating...splendidly thought-provoking... I couldn't put it down.' --Professor Mary Midgley, The Guardian
'...beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous...tells us about...rapidly evolving technologies and experimental work in fascinating and lucid detail.'
--Professor AC Grayling, Literary Review
'...beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous...as if it were an adventure story... Absorbing and fascinating."
--A.C. Grayling, Literary Review, 1st December 2009
`...remarkable... McGilchrist's explanation of such oddities in terms of our divided nature is clear, penetrating, lively, thorough and fascinating.'
--Mary Midgley, Guardian, 2nd January 2010
`...splendidly thought-provoking. And I do have to say that, fat though it is, I couldn't put it down.'
--The London Review Bookshop, London Review of Books, February 2010
`...while the book develops an argument it is also a treasure chest of fascinating detail and memorable quotation.'
--Adam Zeman, Standpoint, 1st March 2010
`Twenty years in the making, this seminal book has been well worth the wait.'
--David Lorimer, Scientific Medical Network, Winter 2010
'McGilchrist is a remarkable person...he writes lucidly...Voices such as McGilchrist are essential.' --Salley Vickers, Daily Telegraph
'McGilchrist writes well, with a direct engaging style...This is a very good book, both informative and erudite.' --Ian Gibbins, Australian Book Review
'McGilchrist...persuasively argues that our society is suffering from an over-dominant left hemisphere losing touch with its natural regulative 'master,' the right.' --Salley Vicker, The Guardian
'McGilchrist, for whom certainty is the greatest of illusions, has produced an absolutely convincing narrative of who we are.' --Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph
'This book is a dazzling achievement...Just as a read, it's an immense pleasure.' --Charles Foster, Contemporary Review
Product Description
Why is the brain divided? The difference between right and left hemispheres has been puzzled over for centuries. In a book of unprecedented scope, Iain McGilchrist draws on a vast body of recent brain research, illustrated with case histories, to reveal that the difference is profound - not just this or that function, but two whole, coherent, but incompatible ways of experiencing the world. The left hemisphere is detail-oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things, and is inclined to self-interest, where the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility and generosity. This division helps explain the origins of music and language, and casts new light on the history of philosophy, as well as on some mental illnesses. In the second part of the book, he takes the reader on a journey through the history of Western culture, illustrating the tension between these two worlds as revealed in the thought and belief of thinkers and artists, from Aeschylus to Magritte. He argues that, despite its inferior grasp of reality, the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, with potentially disastrous consequences. This is truly a tour de force that should excite interest in a wide readership.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
81 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A masterly achievement,
By
This review is from: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Hardcover)
This is a brilliant and staggeringly erudite book that only Iain McGilchrist could have written. Originally a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in English literature, he retrained in medicine and has brought together CP Snow's 'two cultures' in a masterly synthesis. McGilchrist overturns the commonly held view of the left hemisphere as dominant, showing conclusively that the right hemisphere is primary but that both are meant to work together. Each has a different but complementary perspective on the world: the right hemisphere apprehends the whole and mediates new experiences, while the left provides focus. The snag is that this narrow focus prefers abstraction to experience and treats living things as mechanisms. This mechanistic metaphor pervades the whole of modern science and indeed economics, with its emphasis on manipulation.
This view tends to dehumanise the world and impose a bureaucratic mentality, from whose excesses we currently suffer as we strive to eliminate all risk in favour of a certainty which does not exist outside mathematics. The second part of the book examines our cultural history in terms of a power struggle between left and right hemispheres, in which the left hemisphere is currently privileged. Here is a new take on the history of Western thought, which will radically reshape your understanding. The book is impressive not just in its scope, but is beautifully written, positively bristling with insights and creative intelligence on every page.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What it is to be human,
By
This review is from: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Paperback)
This could well be an important book. It certainly has that feel. It's well written and documented with many references covering subjects like neurology, psychology, music, literature, philosophy and many more. This may also be what puts some off because the density of these can be overwhelming at times. However, if this does not put you off (and it certainly doesn't do that to me), the book is an absorbing and rewarding read.
It begins with a survey of research into the left and right brain hemispheres, and looking at how they interact with each other. It looks at brain research and the affect injuries have on people's cognitive, intellectual and artistic abilities, even pointing out how a tumour in the left brain "cured" a case of anorexia nervosa. Then McGilchrist takes the reader into various human activities relating them to brain hemisphere research. For example he suggests music may be a right hemisphere activity, whilst some aspects of science may be more left hemisphere. Then in second half of the book he looks at how times in history might be seen as dominated by one hemisphere or the other, and suggests our won era may be too dominated by left-hemisphere. Much of this is speculative, as McGilchrist readily admits several times in the course of the book. Yet he is certainly not uninformed on his subject or in the readings from many sources. Whether brain research is advanced enough, or not, to link the brain hemispheres to human activity, on another level this book is fascinating in the way it relates aspects of human behaviour to each others. It has an ambition and broadness of scope that sometimes seems rare nowadays, and this adds to its fascination. Right or wrong, this book asks a lot of the right questions. At its heart is an enquiry into what makes us human, and for this alone it demands to be read. I'll leave readers to decide for themselves as to how much and where they agree or disagree with McGilchrist. Personally, I find a great deal that I do, and I suspect few will leave the book without finding that it has stimulated a great deal of thought.
36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Vital Key to Understanding Ourselves and Our Culture,
By
This review is from: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Hardcover)
I have been fascinated and enthralled by The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. I believe it could make an important contribution to an understanding of the situation we are in now and how it has come into being. If we can understand how our view of reality has been created and controlled by an imbalance between the two hemispheres of our brain, we would be able to gain a different perspective on our predicament rather than remaining stuck, without the benefit of insight, within it.
The book explains how the growing and now dangerous dissociation between the right and left hemispheres of our brain has brought into being the culture of the modern Western world as well as the mind-set of the politicians, "opinion-makers" and the media that direct and control it. Drawing on his long experience as a psychiatrist but also on a long-standing interest in and knowledge of history, literature and philosophy, the author offers the reader a vitally important, even crucially important key to understanding both our own nature and our present view of reality. The Master and His Emissary is grounded in a profound understanding of the neuroscience of the brain and also in an equally profound understanding of different historical epochs that have exhibited either a balance or a lack of balance between the left and right hemispheres. If read by enough people who are not caught in this imbalance, it could have the power to shift our culture towards a position of greater balance, thereby freeing us from the straitjacket of beliefs in which, for too long, we have been imprisoned. Anne Baring, psychotherapist and author
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Medical & Healthcare Practitioners > Internal Medicine > Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Neuropsychology
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Schools of Thought > Evolutionary Psychology
- Books > History > Ancient History & Civilisation
- Books > History > Cultural History
- Books > Science & Nature > Biological Sciences > Human Biology > Medical Anthropology
- Books > Science & Nature > Biological Sciences > Human Biology > Neuroscience
- Books > Science & Nature > Medicine > Medical Sciences A-Z > Neurology
- Books > Scientific, Technical & Medical
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
