How We Feel: What Neuroscience Can – and Can’t – Tell Us About Our Emotions
Giovanni Frazzetto
Which goes further to explain feelings of guilt – a brain scan or a Caravaggio painting? As a student, the Italian neuroscientist Giovanni Frazzetto was moved by the transcript of Max Weber’s 1918 lecture “Science as a Vocation”, in which Weber argued that the process of intellectual rationalisation (termed Entzauberung, or “disenchantment”) produces human progress but adds nothing to the store of human meaning. Frazzetto’s book guides readers through the latest neurological research, stopping at each revelation to question what has been discovered. He asks which is better for fending off anxiety: medical research on rats, or philosophy? Is a bizarre neurological syndrome the key to understanding love, or did Shakespeare crack that one in his sonnets?
Doubleday, 320pp, £20
The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
Robin Blackburn
In his analysis of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas, the historian and former editor of the New Left Review Robin Blackburn shows how the trade in African slaves – a catalyst in the shift from agriculture to industry – helped the rise of capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic. The spread of ideals born of Enlightenment thinking in France and North America led to a series of emancipatory moments in Haiti, the US, Cuba and Brazil, forging many liberal ideas that remain influential today.
Verso, 520pp, £14.99
Europe’s Deadlock
David Marsh
David Marsh, the chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, argues that crisis management will never fix the existential problems at the heart of the European Union. What is required is the restructuring of the project as a whole. Marsh lays out a number of options in this neat and concise book – all of which are being “blocked by indecision and incompetence at the top”.
Yale University Press, 130pp, £7.99
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