Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command ****

I enjoyed the fourth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series just as I have the previous three. The way O'Brian works sailing lingo into the story without stalling the plot remains unparalleled.

In The Mauritius Command, Jack Aubrey serves as the commodore for a squadron of ships trying to wrest a pair of islands in the Indian Ocean from the occupying French. Aubrey expresses ambivalence about the fact that he is overseeing the battles rather than fully participating in them, and as a reader I had a similar ambivalence about the battle scenes which didn't seem as vivid as in previous books. Partly that's due to Aubrey's position and partly it's due to the sheer number of different ships involved in the campaign. It wasn't always easy to keep track of them all.

As compensation for the weaker fight sequences, the book has interesting subsidiary characters in the captains serving under Aubrey. Captain Lord Clonfort and Captain Corbett were possibly painted a bit too broadly, but it was fascinating to see how their personalities affected their command styles, and how those command styles affected the functioning of their ships.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary ** 1/2

I can sum up the theme of this long-winded 500-page book in one paragraph:

Human experience involves the interplay of two fundamentally opposed modes of reality, which we can refer to as rationality and mysticism, Apollonian and Dionysian (as Nietzsche would call it), scientific and religious (as Bertrand Russell says in A History of Western Philosophy), or analytic and integrative. The structure of our brains reflects this fundamental opposition, with the left hemisphere corresponding to the first mode and the right hemisphere corresponding to the second mode. Over recorded history, and especially in the past century, the left hemispheric version of reality has taken on undue precedence.

Thinkers throughout the ages have commented on the basic opposition; McGilchrist's novel contribution is the claim that it maps to the asymmetries between the brain hemispheres. It's an interesting claim, and the early chapters where he describes the neuroscientific results are the most compelling — although even in these chapters, he seems to beg the question (in the traditional meaning of the phrase) of whether each hemisphere has its own worldview. Starting a few chapters in, he simply substitutes the terms "left hemisphere" and "right hemisphere," without further argument, in places where other philosophers would use one of the other pairs of terms. He piles on the "evidence" in a repetitive and not very original fashion. He doesn't really argue for his position so much as provide a mountain of facts that are merely consistent with it.

In the end, I was left to wonder what difference it makes whether he's right about how the distinction maps to the structure of the brain: as he carefully points out in the introduction to Part II, he's not claiming that the structure of the brain has changed over the course of recorded history, so how is his view different from a purely cultural explanation of our tilt toward scientism?

I think McGilchrist has an intriguing idea, but I found his presentation of it exhausting and unconvincing. The longer the book went on, the more it seemed like a mere plea for recognizing the importance of mysticism in opposing the sterility of a purely rational world.

Jack Pendarvis, Your Body is Changing ***

I picked up this collection of stories at Red Lodge Books in Red Lodge, Montana, based on a cover blurb from George Saunders. Pendarvis has a humorous narrative voice similar to Saunders' although his plots hew closer to reality. The greatest strength of the stories is the dialogue, especially the ways in which people take pride in the things they claim to dislike about themselves.

"Isn't that funny, I don't even know what Jay Leno looks like," said Mandy. "That's just how little television I watch.... Isn't that just dreadful of me? People become intimidated when they realize that my opinions are so uninformed when it comes to television."

My favorite story is "Outsiders"; it consists almost entirely of this type of dialogue.