The Highest and Lowest Suicide Rate

Book Bound With Human Skin

Book Bound With Human Skin of a Would-Be Assassin Bought at Car Boot Sale

This post is compliments of the abebooks.com blog. I'm not sure which part is weirdest, his preserved piece of skin that once bound a book together or way this odd piece of ephemera was bought at what is called a British car boot sale, a.k.a. a trunk sale. Oh how I wish I could come across something this rare while scouting for books.

The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio R. Damasio

This holiday weekend I got an order for a book I was sad to see leave because I was hoping I'd get a chance to crack it open or see what it was about before having to ship it off. As you might imagine, this happens a lot. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness is by Antonio R. Damasio, who also wrote Descartes Error.  The very top of the book declares  "New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice". This was where I went first to learn about the book the I'd just sealed in a bubble mailer. Before going into what William H. Calvin's NYT review said about Damasio's book I have to mention that they are both neurologists, which for me, goes a long way to explain why the word "body", clearly stated in the book's subtitle, is oddly missing from Calvin's review of the book. Actually he doesn't completely avoid this aspect of the book because it is is embedded in his reference to the qualia nature of the book. Aside from this aside, his discussion of the corporal dimension of the book lacking. The first part of the review is an cursory introduction to neurological discourse on consciousness to ensure the placement of Damasios contribution within a continuing discourse. The review is worth reading but it left me wondering what the book had to say about the physical body and it's relationship to consciousness.

The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine published a review of the book that did a good job articulating Damasio's importance for non-neurologists like myself.

Damasio has suggested that while the senses of vision, hearing, touch, taste smell function by nerve activation patterns that correspond to the state of the external world; emotions are nerve activation patterns that correspond to the state of the internal world. If we experience a state of fear, then our brains will record this body state in nerve cell activation patterns obtained from neural and hormonal feedback, and this information may then be used to adapt behaviour appropriately.

In short, the feeling or emotions of what happens to a given person is an expression of the internal physiological world. 

Black Desi & HP high tech camera

I want this blog to focus on books but when I first read a blurb about racist camera I had to go find the video. The first thing I found was this BBC article about it, which means its getting a lot of serious attention worldwide. Then I found the video



The thing that catches everyone's attention is the word "racist." After seeing the video it seems like he is using the word as a joke, a really expensive and bad joke, but something to get a laugh at none the less. When Desi uses the word "racist" in this video he doesn't mean that it systematically disenfranchises people of color, rather Desi uses the word to merely express frustration at the way the technology wasn't working for this particular black person right now. That's my take on this video.

Here is one video response to the technical aspect of the video worth seeing.

Prohibition Hangover

Garrett Peck talks about his book Prohibition Hangover while walking BookTV through one of the temperance tours he does in D.C. Not so surprising is the news that the temperance movement was led by protestants, however Garrett expands on this dynamic of the movement by talking about how this effected ethnic groups, and how the 18th amendment got passed. I had no idea that Prohibition and the temperance movement had a lot of racist sentiments and was born out of a pre-wartime fever.