Carl Zimmer - Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How It Changed the World

Praise for Soul Made Flesh

Carl Zimmers illuminating book charts a fascinating chapter in the souls journey.... Zimmer successfully communicates his enthusiasm for the energetic minds and busy pens of his heroes. His book is timely.

The New York Times Book Review

Ravaged by religious wars and capricious monarchs, 17th-century England was a kingdom in chaos. Against this bloody backdrop, Zimmer recounts physician Thomas Willis momentous discovery that the brainpreviously dismissed as a bowl of curdsis the seat of human consciousness and memory. This page-turner is a tribute to the heretical thinkers who decoded nature by relying on direct observation rather than received opinion.

Wired magazine

An uncommonly literate look at a little-explored side of scientific history, and a thumping good read at that.

Timothy Ferris, author of The Whole Shebang and Coming of Age in the Milky Way

We live in what Carl Zimmer, one of our most gifted science writers, calls a Neurocentric Age... Zimmer describes... a kind of second Copernican revolutionone inside the body.... Thrilling... Zimmers nimble survey of the intellectual landscape of the 17th century [is] a top-notch work of popular science, chock-full of fascinating lore and inspired quotations.... Hosts of knotty concepts are treated to lucid descriptions, and his fluent prose and vivid narration prove themselves as much at home among the complex historical and political crosscurrents of the 17th century as they are with finely tuned accounts of biochemistry or MRI scanners.

Ross King, author of Brunelleschis Dome, in the Los Angeles Times

In Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer gives a remarkable, beautiful account of Englands genius century. Zimmer brings Willis to lifehis prose, as always, is clear, vivid, and arrestingand reminds us how startling and revolutionary his discoveries were.

Oliver Sacks

A deep and contextualized exploration of two millennias worth of human theories about consciousness and the soul.... [Zimmers] wide-ranging narrative reaches from the days of Aristotle to a 21st-century lab in the basement of a Princeton University building. The central figure in Zimmers tale is the oft-overlooked 17th-century scientist Thomas Willis, a figure of fascinating contradictions.... In the end, however, this book is less about Willis in particular than about the evolving metaphysics of the soul in general, and the reader is left with a better picture of the roots of the modern understanding of the self as well as a familiarity with one of the unsung heroes of the scientific revolution.

Publishers Weekly

A gifted science writer, Zimmer recounts Willis singular achievement in a narrative that illuminates not only the scientific revolution in medicine but also the cross-grained personality of one of the chief revolutionaries.... A remarkable fusion of scientific history and cultural analysis.

Booklist (starred review)

Soul Made Flesh tells the fascinating story of how people first became aware of one of the most radical thoughts the human mind has ever had to think. The writing is vivid and literate, the story compelling, and the modern implications drawn out with skill and verve.

Steven Pinker, bestselling author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate

Carl Zimmer clarifies and illuminates the story of a fascinating thinker. By focusing on a single player in the vast spectacle that was the Scientific Revolution, and telling his story so well, Zimmer gives us insights into the age when Alchemy gave way to modern science. But this is not only a history book, for readers with an interest in consciousness and the brain will find much here that applies to research going on today.

Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon

Instructive and engaging.... Like The Lunar Men, Jenny Uglows recent tour de force history of 18th century British scientists, Zimmers book is a study in intellectual comradeship and cooperation, and how thinkers are shaped by their milieu.

Newsday

Few writers can bring back the odor and the sense of time that are present during historic discoveries. Few can capture the extent of human ignorance that is present and is about to be illuminated. Carl Zimmer writes with a rare, captivating skill that brings one back to that place. This is a must read.

Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., David T. McLaughlin Distinguished Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth College, and author of Natures Mind

Soul Made Flesh provides an account of the first big steps toward an understanding of how the brain makes mind.... A fine intellectual history... full of drama.

Natural History

Wry and engaging... Zimmer plunges us elbow deep into the messy realities of 17th-century medicine.

Hartford Courant

The main parallels that can be drawn between politics, religion, science, and human behavior then and now add unexpected dividends to this engaging narrative. Absorbing and thought-provoking.

Kirkus Reviews

Zimmer draws a vivid picture of the background against which Willis and other scientists of the time worked.

Scientific American

A panoramic history of England during a period of political upheaval, civil war, religious ferment, plague and assorted other stresses.

St. Petersburg Times

A fascinating look at the medical pioneer who dared to explore the seat of the soul.... Zimmer paints a vivid picture of the life and times of this stubborn 17th-century trailblazer.... Willis left behind a legacy more far-reaching than he could have dreamed. We are in his debt, and in Zimmers as well for his hugely entertaining portrait of this scientific hero.

BookPage

Carl Zimmer brings to astonishingly vivid life a momentous turning point in sciences history, when a band of brave British anatomists revealed that our memories, visions, fears, dreamsour very soulsspring from a three-pound lump of flesh in our skulls. One of our best science journalists turns out to be a skilled historian as well.

John Horgan, author of The End of Science and Rational Mysticism

Peppered with amusing anecdotes about the principal philosophers who struggled with the nature of the sensitive and rational soul.

Nature Neuroscience

A breath-taking journey.... Elegant and enthralling.... A luminous narrative of lively characters and of the brains desire to know itself.

Billerica (MA) Minuteman

An award-winning science writer narrates the little-known story of Thomas Willis. He discusses the context of 17th-century views, politics, and the insights of other scientists and philosophersall leading to a new scientific paradigm.

Book News, Inc.

Soul Made Flesh makes good reading.

New England Journal of Medicine

Witty and erudite... Carl Zimmer has faithfully recounted the long saga of the problem of explicating the brain and how it became more scientifically based as a result of the studies of Willis and his colleagues.

Brain: A Journal of Neurology

As intellectual history, [Soul Made Flesh] is a superb read for anyone and a must read for neuroscientists.

Science & Theology News

Soul Made Flesh belongs in all libraries and would make a superb gift for the neuroscientist or anyone who works with the brain. Zimmers knowledge of the period and depiction of the individuals who were responsible for many important scientific theories make for an exciting read. This was a hard book to put down.

The Journal of Clinical Investigation

[An] engrossing account of how mechanism replaced spirit, and how the soul was finally banished to the stuff of dreams... Zimmers book has many virtues [and] is adept at bringing together the luminaries and other actors of the time.