Damon Galgut - The Promise (Chatto & Windus, 2021) ****

"The Promise" is an excellent book. It has been widely acclaimed and translated. I've been impressed by the number of people whom I have met who were reading it, so I assume there's not much need to further promote it. 

Galgut describes the lives of a family over a few decades, with constantly shifting perspectives among the characters, as if they passed on the third person narrative like relay runners, with the omniscient narrator holding it all together. 

The title refers to the promise made by the just deceased mother of the family to the black maid who worked on their farm and helped raised the children to receive a plot of land with a cabin as her own property. Now that the mother is dead, the father and the other members of the family are not inclined to deliver on this promise. The strongest voice in the book is that of Amor, the youngest daughter, who is the strongest proponent of living up to the promise, resulting in conflict with the rest of the family, or at best total indifference. 

Galgut's writing, his style as much as his sense of composition, is excellent, and he manages to convey a deep sense of humanity - from deep anger to subtle tenderness - and the internal and external struggles they lead to. 

Easy to recommend. 

Joseph Henrich - The Secret Of Our Success (Princeton University Press, 2016) *****

I was more than impressed by Henrich's other, more recent work - The Weirdest People In The World - that I went back to his successful earlier book "The Secret Of Our Success". Henrich is an anthropologist and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. 

In this book, Henrich explains how nature and nurture are in fact meaningless concepts, since humans have evolved, also genetically as the result of cultural evolution, and we have changed nature around us as well. We depend on our cumulative culture for survival, we need to live in cooperative groups, using allo-parenting, the division of labour and information, and on our communicative abilities to be what we are today: a biological anomaly, a new kind of animal. The chronological concept that we are developed in nature, and then later developed our culture is an erroneous one: our culture affects our genes and our genes affect our culture: both co-evolve, and are still co-evolving. Henrich provides numerous examples from biology, cognitive sciences, linguistics, economics, history and anthropology to build his convincing case. 

We are a cultural species, whether we want to or not, and understanding this, will help us understand the perspectives of others even better. We are not determined once and for all. Henrich ends his book with eight insights that will help this understanding and paving the way for future research and human progress.  Especially his examples related to language, communication, cooperation and collective brains show how collaborative and communal efforts have led to benefits for us all. Henrich gives examples of how highly intelligent and resourceful explorers did not manage to survive in difficult situations (from the arctic to the Australian desert), despite their brains and technology, while local indigenous people did. They lacked the collective intelligence of the local tribes. 

Henrich's sweeping picture of humanity is well-substantiated and easy to read. For instance, his example that humans can outrun quadrupeds in terms of endurance, and have done so daily as hunters, for the simple reason of using gourds of water they took with them to compensate for sweating and dehydration. The cultural invention compensates for the natural deficit, turning it into an advantage, and thus better chance of survival. 

It's a humbling and insightful book, well-written and compelling. Henrich concludes:

‘To move forward in our quest to better understand human life, we need to embrace a new kind of evolutionary science, one that focuses on the rich interaction and co-evolution of psychology, culture, biology, history, and genes. The scientific road is largely untravelled, and no doubt many obstacles and pitfalls lie ahead, but it promises an exciting journey into unexplored intellectual territories, as we seek to understand a new kind of animal.’

Claire-Louise Bennett - Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape, 2021) **

This is possibly the most hyped book of the year. Claire-Louise Bennett describes her main character's situation in an "out of breath" style, with endless repetitions, short bursts of sentences barely qualifying for their definition, in an internal monologue of irritating and often nonsensical emphatic use of repetitions. Yes. Yes. Yes. Repetitions. As much as the writing irritates, like a first year student in creative writing finding a personal voice, the content has not much to offer either, except an endless list of literary name-dropping of literary icons, as a self-obsessed and immature effort to lift herself by her bootstraps, without actually getting anywhere. 

Maybe all this sounds a little too harsh, but I guess that readers need to be warned too when they risk wasting their precious time. 

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo - Le Fils De L'Homme (Gallimard, 2021) ****

In "Le Fils De L'Homme", Del Amo describes the lives of a mother and young boy whose father returns after many years only to drag them to his mountain cabin where they continue to live in perfect isolation and also desolation. 

The father is unpredictable, jealous, erratic, violent and on the verge of madness. The mother is powerless, anxious, loving,  terrified ... and pregnant. The boy oscillates between both parents, happy to be taken for an adult when he gets shooting lessons, feeling lost when he cannot make sense of what's happening with the adults and their environment. 

Del Amo's characters are poor, also in their strength to make something of their lives. The mother reads popular romance novels in order to escape from her dreary reality. The father relives the situation he was brought up in by his own father, an equally violent despot. Both are gentle with the boy, loving even, even if both are too tied up in their own problems to really give him the environment that he needs. 

Del Amo describes and brings to live the terrifying emotions of anonymous characters, in whose situation we are dropped with direct experience of every minute action that each of them makes, full of physical power and virtuose language, and further strengthened by the use of the simple present, which gives the reader to be part of the action as it unfolds in all its dramatic and tragic plot. I am used to read in French, I hear French all the time, but I must admit that many phrases contain words that I now read for the first time. His language is rich, but his style is direct, including in the dialogues. 

The novel is a kind of update of Greek tragedy. Even if the end was not predicted (by Cassandra or some character), every reader knows from the start that things will not end well. The fact that the characters don't have names even strengthens the abstract theme of returning generational violence. It is Del Amo's strength that he made his descriptions tangibly concrete to make us live the experience. 

Highly recommended!

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr - La Plus Secrète Mémoire Des Hommes (Philippe Rey, 2021) ****

Mystery novel, political novel, humanistic novel, crime novel, sociological novel, a novel about literature ... "La Plus Secrère Mémoire des Hommes" has many levels at which it can be read. 

On the surface, it's a search for a book written in 1938 "Le Labyrinthe De L'Inhumain" (the labyrinth of the inhuman), which was acclaimed as written by the "Rimbaud nègre", an African with the writing skills of one of France's most revered authors. The author, T.C. Elimane, completely vanished from the earth, as the copies of the books were taken from bookshops and destroyed, based on the accusation of plagiarism. 

A young writer from Senegal, Diégane Latyr Faye, the main character, tries to reconstruct what happened, based on publications and people who knew the author, and he comes across even more mysteries, in the sense that every one who ever read the book, has died from unnatural causes. 

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was not known to me, and it is thanks to his winning of the Prix Goncourt that he came to my attention. Sometimes literary prizes are indeed deserved, as is the case here. His writing is entertaining, making this novel as full as suspense as a crime novel, even if the greater theme is about literature and culture, about cross-cultural interaction and adoption, about skills and appreciation. The novel is also about living true to your beliefs, and the fact that a very promising author disappeared from the world in order not to give in to the forces of expectation and society, is also a very modern one. But it also touches on the quality of life versus personal gain, of rationality versus a more mystic appreciation of our world. And despite all these abstract themes, woven together in a tight fabric of stylistically refined text, the characters remain human, with their desires, fears, conflicts and expectations. 

We are spoiled this year with great novels. This one is surely among them. 

Bart D. Ehrman - Heaven And Hell - A History Of The Afterlife (OneWorld, 2020) ****

One of the weird aspects of having received a catholic education and weekly mass, is the amount of fabulation you are being served by the myths of the religion that have actually no real presence in the Bible, be it the Old or New Testament. And then especially about what most people would consider the core beliefs of the religion: there is such a thing like heaven and hell where life after death awaits us, the former for the good people, the latter for the bad. There is even no mention of the "devil" or "satan" in the Bible either. 

Several years ago I read Alan F. Segal's "Life After Death", a very erudite book that gives a history of the concept of heaven and hell, of resurrection and the way they were build up over the centuries after christianity started to get traction. The Church had endless discussions about the form and shape of our eternal soul, material or immaterial, with senses or without senses, recognisable or not. One question was not addressed by Segal, namely at what precise moment the dead would go to heaven, immediately after their death, or at the end of times, when the Final Judgment happens. 

Theologian Bart Ehrman answers this question luckily in his new book "Heaven And Hell". Like Segal, he gives a sweeping and well-documented overview of what the Bible actually says about the afterlife, and how the notions we know today have come into existence. He starts very early on, with the Gilgamesh epos, the ancient Greeks, the Hebrew Bible, the gospels, including all the apocryphical gospels that were eventually not included in the canon, as well as later versions that show the various thoughts about what life after death could mean, including by Church fathers such as Augustinus and Tertullianus. 

Thanks to the digital availability of the ancient books on internet, I once made my own calculations based on semantic analysis of the Old & New Testament. Words like "hell" or "purgatory" are never used in the bible, and the concept of "eternal life" gets zero mentions in the Old Testament and 33 in the New, of which 16 in the gospel of John, but he primarily referred to the end times, when the kingdom of god came to earth, and not the other way round that we would go to heaven.  It must be clear that if these are really core beliefs of original christianity, they would appear much more often than is the case now. Ehrman manages to explain all this with the source material at hand. 

This is obligatory reading for anybody interested in religion, both believers and non-believers. 

Books of the Year 2021

I spent a great deal of my time this year re-reading my favorite comic books (by Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Christophe Blain), and watching a lot of television series (possibly too many). 

That is why my focus on reading was more directed towards non-fiction, mostly about the situation of our human species, in the universe, in our history, our interactions, our society. 

Two books really stood out for me: Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People In The World", about what historical aspects - including the church's prohibition to marry first cousins - created a drive toward innovation and democracy in Western Europe in the past 700 years. The second is Francesca Stavrakopoulou's "God, An Anatomy", in which she details all the body parts of god based on biblical and other ancient texts, helping us interpret some of the strange sayings in the bible, and to understand its origins from other and earlier religions. Both books show an incredible knowledge of the subject matter, inventive insights and craftfully written. 

I also enjoyed "Metazoa", a book that explores the level of consciousness among living things, from the simplest to the most complex. 

Non-fiction

1. Joseph Henrich - The WEIRDest People In The World (Allan Lane, 2020) ***** 
2. Francesca Stavrakopoulou - God - An Anatomy (Picador, 2021) ***** 
3. Peter Godfrey-Smith - Metazoa - Animal Minds And The Birth Of Consciousness (William Collins, 2020) ****½ 
4. Francis Fukuyama - Identity - Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (Profile Books, 2019) **** 
5. Michio Kaku - The God Equation - The Quest For A Theory Of Everything (Allen Lane, 2021) **** 
6. Rebecca Wragg Sykes - Kindred - Neanderthal Live, Love, Death And Art (Bloomsbury, 2020) **** 
7. Martin Amis - Inside Story (Jonathan Cape, 2020) **** 
8. Carlo Rovelli - Helgoland (Allan Lane, 2021) **** 
9. Anil Seth - Being You - A New Science Of Consciousness (Faber & Faber, 2021) **** 
10. Sarah Rose Cavanagh - Hivemind - The New Science Of Tribalism in our Divided World (Orion Spring, 2019) *** 
11. Heidi J. Larson - Stuck  "How Vaccine Rumors Start - And Why They Don't Go Away"(Oxford University Press, 2020) ***½ 
12. Ronald F. Inglehart - Cultural Evolution (Cambridge University Press, 2018) ***½ 
13. Brian Clegg - Dark Matter & Dark Energy (Icon Books, 2019) ***

Fiction

1. Salman Rushdie - Quichotte (Penguin, 2019) **** 
2. Mario Vargas Llosa - Harsh Times (Faber, 2021) ***½ 
3. Fiona Mozley - Elmet (John Murray, 2018) ***½ 
4. Kent Haruf - Plainsong (Picador, 1999) *** 
5. Tim Winton - That Eye The Sky (Penguin, 1986) *** 
6. Yasser Abdel Hafez - The Book Of Safety (Hoopoe, 2013) **½ 
7. Julian Barnes - The Only Story (Penguin, 2018) ** 
8. Ocean Vuong - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019) ** 
9. Denis Johnson - The Largesse Of The Sea Maiden (Vintage, 2018) * 

Mario Vargas Llosa - Harsh Times (Faber, 2021) ***½

Last year I almost wrote that it was time for Mario Vargas Llosa (born in 1936) to stop writing, disappointed as I was with "The Neighborhood". 

It's good that he did not stop yet. "Harsh Times" is definitely not among his best novels, but it is much better than most novels being published today. The book describes the first free democratic elections in Guatemala in the early 50s and the machinations by the banana company United Fruit, the big landowners and the United States to topple the regime and to re-install the dictatorship of before. In the full Cold War of the times, the United States and the CIA created the communist presence in Central America (is the subtext in this narrative). Countries and peoples that were opposed to the dictatorship of the big landowners were immediately classified as communist and driven into the hands of the Soviet Union. It shows with lots of details of real historic figures how things happened and with which results. 

Vargas Llosa writes the book from different perspectives, with a strong narrative around 'Miss Guatemala', Marta Borrero, the wife of the President Carlos Castillo Armas, who fled the country after his assasination in 1957. Armas was brought to power in 1954  after an invasion by the "Liberation Army", supported by some neighbouring countries (Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic) and the United States. His democratically elected predecessor President Arbenz, was forced to abdicate, but Castillo Armas brutal regime (that included the exclusion from voting by illiterate people or 2/3 of the population) was also not deliving everything the very rich expected, including his initiative for big companies to pay taxes. 

The other parallel narrative is focused on Johnny Abbes García, the Dominican intelligence officer who sets up the whole murder of Castillo Armas. 

Like in many other novels ("Conversations in the Cathedral"), Vargas Llosa intertwines narrative times and parallel situations, which require attentive reading to keep track of what is happening. The political novel is not new to him, and the novel comes close to "The Feast Of The Goat", which is a real masterpiece. "Harsh Times" does not come close to both these novels, but it is more than worth reading. 

Vargas Llosa gives a different interpretation of what might have happened during the assassination of Castillo Armas. The official viewpoint is that he was shot twice by a leftist guard who committed suicide right after. Vargas Llosa goes for the version that the assassination was orchestrated by the United States and the Dominican Republic. 

The topic of the book is quite timely, because it appears that the foreing policy of the United States has still not learned from the situation, also in recent times, with Afghanistan as the best example. 

Kent Haruf - Plainsong (Picador, 1999) ***

You can only admire the humanity of this book. It describes the lives of several families living in the town of Holt, Colorado. One story is about two boys growing up with their father and increasingly absent mother. The other is about the teenage girl getting pregnant and deciding to keep the baby. 

Haruf tells the story with a lot of compassion, bringing to life the confusion and self-determination of adolescents, not knowing where to go or what to do, but at the same time feeling old enough to make major decisions. 

It is sweet, but not essential. 

Ron Newby - Tribalism - An Existential Threat To Humanity (Lulu, 2020) *

"Tribalism" is a collection of insights on the broad topic of human evolution leading up to today's global challenges. It is bacly written, badly published, possibly not even corrected for mistakes ... and if you want to see the picture that illustrates the text, you get the full URL so you can check yourself on Wikipedia. 

The book goes into a lot of detail on irrelevant facts that have nothing to do with 'tribalism'. I can understand that Newby is shocked in a way by the upcoming nationalism and tribal ingroup behaviour, but his book does not shed light on the problem itself, let alone on the solutions. 

The topic obviously deserves better. 

Salman Rushdie - Quichote (Penguin, 2019) ****

This book by Salman Rushdie is easy to recommend. He takes on the story of Don Quichotte and wonderfully transforms it to the current madness of our world, exemplified (and amplified) by the United States. Apart from the high level of readibility of this novel, there are so many layers in the book that it is also a very intellectual pleasure. Don Quichotte was the first novel in the strictest sense, revealing the stupidity and otherworldly character of medieval chivalric romances. Rushdie takes on this aspect by doing the same with our capitalist world that is dominated by greed and entertainment. 

The main character does not even exist. He is the fictitious character in the book written by one of the other characters in the book: an Indian spy-novel author who is trying to come to terms with his past and family, especially his estranged son and sister. To make matters even more complicated, Quichotte creates his own Sancho Panza as a magic creation of his own imagination, a son that he never had, and amazingly enough, this creation of the imagination starts living his own life in the book, dissociating himself fully from his "father". 

The modern Quichotte is of course no longer influenced by chivalric romances but by trash TV. 

It is a book about everything in our modern world: globalisation, racism, capitalism, religion*, TV, pharmaceuticals and the opioid crisis, nationalism and in the process he shows his credits to world literature: Alice in Wonderland, Moby Dick, Pinocchio, Lolita, ...

The writing is excellent, but even more impressive is the carefully structured fabric of all the different stories gradually unfolding, with situations and dialogues that encourage to keep reading. 

On top of that, the characters are real, rounded characters, with their flaws, their evolution, with challenges to overcome and with gradually new perspectives and emotions on things. Even if the novel is very political and intellectual in its concept, Rushdie also manages to make the emotional connection between characters and reader. 

*"God, Sancho decided, was the Clint Eastwood 'Man With No Name' type. Didn't talk a whole lot, kept his thoughts to himself, and every so often he was the high-plain drifter riding into town chewing on a cigar and sending everybody straight to hell". 

Sarah Rose Cavanagh - Hivemind - The New Science Of Tribalism in our Divided World (Orion Spring, 2019) ***

Sarah Rose Cavanagh is a professor of psychology at the D'Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, Massachusetts. 

"Hivemind" explores the concept of how groups can think and act with a collective consciousness, and she starts with the example of the beehive. She then moves on to see which type of 'neural synchrony' also exist in humans, and apparently close friends and romantic lovers show reaction similarities in fMRI scans. 

She takes a look at how in our current society, the traditional cohesion makes place for new human hives, through the use of social media (and its resulting fragmentation, and often radicalisation of viewpoints) and the increase of nationalism and conflict. She ends her book with seven lessons to be learned from bees and to be transposed to our society: and many of them appear to be obvious: use social media for connection, embrace the power of the collective, but temper it with dissent and innovation, regulate your emotions, build more inclusive ingroups (we are more bonobo than chimp), listen to people's stories, build and support architectures of serendipity. 

She brings an interesting perspective on the big debate about nationalism and group mentality.

Francis Fukuyama - Identity - Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (Profile Books, 2019)

World-renowned political scientist Francis Fukuyama became famous with his book "The End Of History". In my quest for understanding nationalism and tribal responses to things happening in society, I have read a number of books on the topic, including this one. 

He starts with the ancient greeks, with Plato and Socrates, coining the term "megalothymia", the desire to be recognised as superior, usually used by the elite in predemocratice societies. The term 'isothymia' would be the desire to be recognised as being equal, which has been a noble goal for democratic societies, even if not yet achieved. But people want to have some pride and dignity. The American declaration of independence asserts that "all men are created equal", but the discussion remain about the qualifier "all men". Does that include women, slaves, workers, immigrants, ...

He gives a big picture of how people need identities, but can be part of different groups. He recommends that basic democratic rights and citizenship are based on a "creedal identity", next to a more cultural, ethnic and religious identity. This "creedal" identity is based on the core values of a liberal democracy in terms of pluralism, voting, justice, respect ... The danger is the upcoming nationalist movements in many countries, which may lead to autocracy, dictatorship and intolerance to minorities. It creates a conflict which makes the opposing parties even more strongly convinced of their own identity. He advocates for a new contract between citizens and the state, and this interestingly also includes the secularisation of education. 

Fukuyama is a sharp analyst, and despite his start with the ancient Greeks, his book is full of modern day examples, too many to mention, but relevant to sharpen our own thinking. 

Julian Barnes - The Only Story (Penguin, 2018) **

"The Only Story" is a story about love, about the love of a 19-year old with a much older woman. The narrator looks back on his life and reminisces about how his 19-year old self navigated this relationship, including dealing with his parents, the tennis club, the husband of his love. 

I am a fan of Julian Barnes, and I normally appreciate his style, his sensitivity and his capacity to make his plot come to life, but somehow I could not relate to any of this in "The Only Story". The narrator is totally uninteresting, and so is his love. I can understand that the narrator takes on a cynical view of his younger self, but still ... I read it and wondered why I should spend time on such uninteresting characters. 

You can't win every time ...

Carlo Rovelli - Helgoland (Allan Lane, 2021) ****

Over the years, I've become a great fan of Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, whose books on physics are always a joy to read. Rovelli is a great writer too, because he understands the lack of knowledge of his readers, and because he knows the stories behind the great discoveries and debates in physics. "Helgoland" is the name of the tree-less island where Werner Heisenberg retreated at the age of 23 to stop suffering from hay fever, and where he came up with the concept of quantum physics. And through the history of physics, and the relevant moments in the lives of its scientists, Rovelli adds questions of a more fundamental philosophical nature. If all these theories are correct, what does this mean for us? If all matter can be divided and divided and divided until nothing is left but relationships, where does that leave us?  If everything is relative, also to the subjective 'I' that does all the measurement, where does that leave consciousness? 

Despite all the advances made, our reality remains a big mystery. And to Rovelli, that by itself appears to be a joy. 

Tony Tanner - Thomas Pynchon (Methuen, 1982)

As a Pynchon fan, this book is almost compulsory reading. It helps to give some perspectives and interpretations of what is happening in Pynchon's novels. Trust me, it does not offer any clues to fully understand Pynchon, which is not the point, but at least it gives some fresh ideas and background facts that help clarify some things. 

Tanner's analysis dates from 1982, so the novels discussed in this short book, are "V", "The Crying Of Lot 49" and "Gravity's Rainbow". Some of Tanner's insights will make you want to read these novels again. 

Enjoy!

Heidi J. Larson - Stuck (Oxford University Press, 2020) ***½

This book's subtitle is "How Vaccine Rumors Start - And Why They Don't Go Away", and it could not be a more appropriate one to read in these times of covid. Heidi Larson is the person who should know. She is Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science and Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Her book is not on corona, but about vaccine hesitancy and organised anti-vaccine movements across the globe. 

Because vaccines will always have risks, there will always be rumours, benign or not. The key question is for the scientists and health policy makers to keep the dialogue open, to explain, and to listen to concerns. The old hierarchical structure of educated scientists, doctors and politicians telling people what to do no longer works (if it ever worked). People find their own evidence, meaning that the conversation, the debate should be organised differently. 

Larson gives a sweeping overview of vaccination over the centuries and across the globe, including the devastating impact of religious beliefs (evangelists, islamists, ...) to block vaccination in developing countries. The fact that you vaccinate people who are not ill, and that companies get money for this, and that this is organised by a government you do not really trust, is the perfect cocktail for rebellion. But she also gives examples closer to home, like the measles outbreak in the United States in 2015 among children who had visited Disneyland. Even if the measles vaccine is among the most used and tested around the world, it suffices that small groups of people do not vaccinate to give the virus a chance to regain power. 

Luckily, as we see now in many countries, people have common sense, and the majority of people are willing to be vaccinated voluntarily. It would be good to have her opinion now with the corona virus crisis still dominating our lives after two years of combatting it. 

Yasser Abdel Hafez - The Book Of Safety (Hoopoe, 2013) **½

Having read and appreciated the books of Naguib Mafouz and Nawal El-Sadawi, Yasser Abdel Hafez is the third Egyptian author that I read. In "The Book Of Safety", the narrator works for the government, and interviews prisoners about their activities, including Mustafa Ismail, a university professor turned master thief. The latter also blackmails the people whose houses he breaks into, and has written "The Book Of Safety", a kind of manual for thieves. 

The novel is not bad, but very slow in its progress. There is an insufficient sense of anticipation and tension about how the narrative will enroll. This is not necessary by itself, if the writing itself is strong enough to keep the reader's attention. As it is, the approach and plot are original, but somehow it is not very memorable. I can recommend Mafouz and El-Sadawi. 

Peter Godfrey-Smith - Metazoa - Animal Minds And The Birth Of Consciousness (William Collins, 2020) ****½

When does consciousness arise in animals? As of which point can we say that there is such a thing as consciousness? Zoologist Peter Godfrey-Smith has published books on the fascinating lives of the octopus, but in "Metazoa" he gradually works his way up the food chain to establish the different kinds of knowledge plants, microbes and animals get from the outside world and from themselves. 

Starting with the chemical reactions between cells and their environment (through ion channels), he explains how matter and energy start creating senses and brains: "these arrangements are not the causes of mind, they are minds. Brain processes are not causes of thoughts and experiences; they are thoughts and experiences". Because living things need energy to exist, they are in constant interaction with their environment to pick up signals, and to ingest nutrients. 

He gives a brilliant example of having a basic consciousness and a sense of self. Even the simplest animals have to be able to identify whether what they feel - through antenna, feelers, skin, or other - is the result of a predator touching them, or whether it is the result of their own movement touching something. At this stage the animal can discern between "self" and "other", as a prerequisite for survival. 

Godfrey-Smith is a great narrator, and his personal knowledge of marine biology, and especially on the octopus, is impressive and fascinating. Whether he's writing about corals, shrimp, crabs or other sea creatures, he brings it to a different level than just describing life under water. It is all about our brain, our experience, our sense of self, our mind. 

Joseph Henrich - The WEIRDest People In The World (Allan Lane, 2020) *****

If you did not know, but W.E.I.R.D in the title stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich & Democratic". It's the kind of bias that we find in pscyhological studies. Henrich is the chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He explores how Western culture developed differently than other cultures, with diverging responses and perspectives on things, but he goes a step further too: by evidence from anthropology, economics, history, religion, law and psychology, he gives a sweeping picture of why the West has become what it is today, how it has evolved, and become dominant across the globe. 

One of the more eye-catching analyses are his statistics on the Catholic church's prohibition of first cousin marriages in Europe as of the fourth Century. This resulted in a seismic shift in village growth, and horizontal mobility. Men had to move to other places in order to find a wife. This led to a more individualistic approach instead of a collective one. It meant that other values became dominant, that commercial exchanges and rational arguments became more important than kinship and generational ownership. That hierarchy of clan elders was replaced by more citizen representation. This simple fact, also led over the longer term to the diminished power of the Church itself on society. Even today, countries with the highest kinship values are often the ones with the lowest levels of democracy. This holds even true in countries like Italy, where high cousing marriages in some provinces in the 20th Century still have effects in lower election participation in the 21st Centruy. Participatory and representative forms of government are the result of societal changes that abolished first cousin marriages. It seems far-fetched at first hearing, yet the evidence and the statistics that Henrich presents are solid and compelling. 

This evolution changed society over centuries and led to the intellectual, technological and political progress we have witnessed in the West. Henrich describes and explains this change. He does not judge or pontificate that the West is best. 

Obviously all this has its effects on policy, and how to address the differences in culture for people living within the same country. Migrations and subcultures require different approaches, and in international politics one has to be aware that what works in some countries, will not necessarily work in others. This is obvious, but Henrich offers us the insights and some of the tools needed to be aware of it and to work with it. 

The book is an eye-opener, and entirely original in its broad scope and synthesis of so many disciplines.