Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When I first heard of this book, I was intrigued by the title. I just recently finished Proust's In Search of Lost Time and I've spent a good part of my career in Neuroscience. So I laughed when I saw the madeleine, the initiator of Marcel's journey of memory, on the cover. But I'm sorry to report that this is a most irritating book. Mr. Lehrer sets up his premise that these eight great artists somehow presaged later discoveries of neuroscience and then bends over backwards to prove it. Each artist/novelist/cook is subjected to egregious cherry-picking of quotes and concepts to align their work with his shallow understanding of neuro-scientific discoveries (his scientific credentials are that he worked in a neuroscience lab as a technician). He covers a lot of ground but it is at a desperate, grad-student level of scholarship. This is confirmed in his acknowledgement section where he admits to having spent a lot of time in the library - probably reading other authors' analyses of these artists. Too bad he didn't study them himself. The book is at its best when he is simply reviewing the contributions made by these giants. Their works are described enthusiastically though not thoroughly. It's like examining the Sistine Chapel with a flashlight - he misses the big picture. But when he reduces the artist's entire body of work down to fit his argument that they somehow anticipated how the brain functions, things really fall apart. Concerning the ones I know well (Proust, Cezanne, Stravinsky, and Woolf), I was startled by how idiotic his extrapolations are. No, Proust was not a neuroscientist. He was a brilliant writer who described the human condition and human behavior like no other. It's insulting to reduce his literary adventure of memory to a discussion of dendritic prions. Had he read the scene from 'Time Regained' where Marcel waits in the library, he'd know that. It is the best statement of Proust's understanding of the power of memory - and it's not mentioned in this book. The 'analysis' in this book is agenda-driven musings of a 25-year-old blogger. After eight chapters of this intellectual alchemy, his conclusion describes the artistic and scientific cultures as dysfunctional children who need to appreciate one another better ("Every humanist should read Nature." What?!) Art and Science are both important tools for exploring our world and ourselves. All human beings have the option to learn, appreciate, and participate in both. They are complementary, not mutually exclusive. But they are best appreciated within their own domain - and not force-fit into the other.