Being You (2021) by Anil Seth

Book Review

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

   I'm always up for a cross-over hit about neuro-science.  Oliver Sacks and his hit The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat is emblematic of the genre, and the entries in this category range from the anecdotal to complicated-science-rendered-comprehensible-for-the-lay-person.  Sacks would be on the anecdotal end of the spectrum, and Seth, and Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, is on the other.  Seth is a major contributor in the scientific field of consciousness studies, and he is serious about advancing his primary thesis: That what we experience as "reality" is in fact a controlled hallucination assembled by our brain.  In other, more colloquial terms, reality really is "an illusion," and a movie like The Matrix is more accurate than our traditional conception of reality being some concrete experience with an objective reality.

  Examples, of course, abound, but one that should be familiar to all is the phenomenon of "the dress" which could be seen as either white and gold or blue and black depending on the viewer.  The dress is a concrete example that reality is 100% subjective, because it tricks everyone's brain in the same way, and different results are obtained.   Seth's research has revealed many interesting aspects of consciousness- another key finding is that reality tends to be shaped by prior experience- in other words, we will continue to see what we expect to see, even in situations where there has been a key change.

Harsh Times (2021) by Mario Vargas Llosa

Book Review

Harsh Times (2021)

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  I was surprised by the lack of American press for Harsh Times, by Peruvian 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa.   After all, America had its greasy hands all over the events depicted in Harsh Times, the lead up and aftermath of the CIA-backed coup against left-leaning Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, who was, upon reflection, a pretty decent guy who didn't deserve what he got.   The style is an almost classical form of "new journalism" where Llosa fictionalizes the real-life participants or pastiches of those people, creating a deft, cinema/television influenced narrative. 

  Thematically, there is heavy overlay with his take down of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, The Feast of the Goat (2000), which, in my mind will forever link that dictator with his fictional(?) habit of deflowering virgins with his fingers because his impotence prevents him from normal intercourse.  And ladies and gentlemen, if that is the kind of detail that bothers you, then steer clear of this book, which features "Miss Guatemala" the disinherited teen bride of a local magnate who becomes the consort of the dictator who replaces Arbenz after the CIA backed coup and then manages a Zelig/Forrest Gump type afterlife as an anti-Communist radio personality based out of the Dominican Republic.