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Nonfiction Views: This week's notable new nonfiction releases [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-09-12  

Good evening, book lovers. I don’t have a full review tonight, but the book I’ve just started (but haven’t read enough to review) is Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses, by Ashley Ward. It is another in a line of books I’ve read that make me disbelieve existence. It’s all just so profuse, so complex, so astounding—our senses, our bodies, the biosphere, our brains, the universe—that it leaves me confounded. How could such a limitless system have evolved...or been created by some mad god? It all must be an illusion.

Take this passage from the introduction to the book:

The brain is the seat of all your knowledge, emotions and personality; it’s the home of your innermost thoughts and the place where you experience everything in your life. Situated safely within the protective capsule of the skull, the brain sits in a carefully controlled physiological equilibrium. It has no sensations of its own, yet this is where all our experiences occur. Supplied by a vast and complex network of connections to the sensory organs, the brain receives the equivalent of terabytes of information every second. It processes and interprets all of this information almost instantaneously, meshing together input from different sources in a seamless computational feat that has no equal.

But it’s just a few pounds of flabby meat! How is this possible? And hey,artificial intelligence? I have a big FU to your AI.

I expect to have more to say about this book next week. But for now, here is the week’s notable new nonfiction:

THIS WEEK’S NEW NONFICTION

All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)

We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/12/2192604/-Nonfiction-Views-This-week-s-notable-new-nonfiction-releases

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