A woman looking at men looking at women : essays on art, sex, and the mind
(Book)

*Starred Review* Exceptionally gifted novelist and essayist Hustvedt, on par with Marilynne Robinson, is an ardently curious, caring, and eloquent thinker and writer inspired equally by the arts, neuroscience, and philosophy. This major collection of essays written between 2011 and 2015 follows the equally substantial nonfiction volume Living, Thinking, Looking (2012) and her award-winning sixth novel, The Blazing World (2014). Hustvedt performs quickening investigations into the depiction of women by the painters Beckmann, de Kooning, and Picasso, and the male body by Mapplethorpe; the undervaluing of women artists, with special attention paid to Louise Bourgeois; and the extreme valuation of Jeff Koons. As she incisively considers works by filmmaker Wim Wenders, literary artist Karl Ove Knausgaard, and painter Anselm Kiefer, Hustvedt illuminates the dynamics of perception and the influence of expectation and context. As she delves ever more deeply into the mind/body, reason/passion, sex/gender splits, she parses the writings of such influential figures as Kierkegaard and Richard Dawkins and ponders her own mysterious synesthesia and the circular challenges of studying mental processes. Though these are erudite and intellectually sophisticated essays, Hustvedt is beguiling and wholly present in each lively, first-person, thrillingly interdisciplinary narrative as she scrutinizes human nature, especially the essential role emotion plays in memory, learning, empathy, morality, and art.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

In this erudite collection, novelist Hustvedt (The Blazing World) explores philosophical questions central to the humanities using research from other disciplines, such as biology, feminist theory, and neuroscience. The questions relate to the self, epistemology, and art and literature, among other things. In the middle portion of the book, in an essay that ought to become canonical, Hustvedt examines the problematic underpinnings of current scientific fads such as evolutionary psychology and computational theory of mind. Her lengthy exercise in phenomenology provides a dense, succinct overview of the mind/body problem, which "has haunted Western philosophy since the Greeks." The questions that preoccupy Hustvedt are the questions of a novelist, but they take consciousness itself as their subject: Where do ideas come from? How do stories get created? What is reflective self-consciousness, and how is it formed? What role do imagination, emotion, memory, and the unconscious play in this thing we call mind? The book conveys the wide range of Hustvedt's reading as she focuses on the interstices between people; between disciplines; and between concepts such as art and science, truth and fiction, feeling and perception. The research is sound and the scholarship engaging, and the exacting prose turns humorous and almost warm when Hustvedt incorporates her personal reflections, exhibiting, as she says of the artist Louise Bourgeois, "a quick mind, interested above all in its own contents." (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Hustvedt's (The Blazing World; The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves) essays, written between 2011 and 2015, make for a weighty, thought-provoking collection. Divided into three sections, the anthology weaves science and the humanities together with a critical eye and a personal touch. The author's central claims throughout, whether writing about art or the mind/body problem, are "all human knowledge is partial" and everyone is influenced by her or his "community of thinkers or researchers." As a result, much of what is delivered by the media as truth or fact is open to question. And question Hustvedt does, leading readers from one idea to the next as she examines something as simple as a hairdo or as complex as memory and imagination. She even attempts to find an answer to the perennial query about where authors get their ideas. Verdict An excellent and fearlessly wide-ranging collection that never stops at the easy answer but continually probes deeper. Not for casual, comfort, or fluff reading, this title demands attention and thought, but the effort is rewarded. [See Prepub Alert, 6/19/16.]-Stefanie Hollmichel, Univ. of St. Thomas Law Lib., Minneapolis © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

What are we? That question informs the authors fertile inquiry into mind, brain, and imagination.Taking the perspective of a perpetual outsider who looks in on several disciplines, Hustvedt (Psychiatry/Weill Medical School; The Blazing World, 2014, etc.) gathers recent essays and talks on the intellectual topics that have long occupied her: art and perception, the mind/body conundrum, madness, consciousness, memory, and empathy. She organizes these pieces into three sections: A Woman Looking at Men Looking At Women, which considers the works of Picasso, Koons, and Louise Bourgeois; an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs curated by filmmaker Pedro Almodvar; Wim Wenders homage to choreographer Pina Bausch; and the authors experience teaching writing to mental patients and undergoing psychoanalysis herself. The second and third sections, Delusions of Certainty and What Are We? consider more directly issues of mind and consciousness: What is a person, a self? Is there a self? What is a mind? Is a mind different from a brain? Hustvedt feels decidedly unsatisfied by the results of fMRI investigations that map brain activity during such events as reading or looking at art. That research, she maintains, reflects a simplistic correspondence between a psychological stateand its neural correlates, without much thought about further meanings or the philosophical issues involved. Nor does she have patience for the assertions of neo-DarwinistsHarvard psychologist Steven Pinker comes in for repeated criticismwho justify why things are the way they are by privileging nature over nurture and insisting that certain traits (men being better at mathematics than women, for example) are rooted in biology. Hustvedt draws uponand presents with sharp claritya prodigious number of sources, including Kierkegaard (whom she first read when she was 15), William James, Kant, George Lakoff (for his investigation of metaphors), physicist Niels Bohr, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and 17th-century scientist Margaret Cavendish, an adamant materialist who took issue with Descartes mind/body dualism, as does Hustvedt.A wide-ranging, irreverent, and absorbing meditation on thinking, knowing, and being. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Exceptionally gifted novelist and essayist Hustvedt, on par with Marilynne Robinson, is an ardently curious, caring, and eloquent thinker and writer inspired equally by the arts, neuroscience, and philosophy. This major collection of essays written between 2011 and 2015 follows the equally substantial nonfiction volume Living, Thinking, Looking (2012) and her award-winning sixth novel, The Blazing World (2014). Hustvedt performs quickening investigations into the depiction of women by the painters Beckmann, de Kooning, and Picasso, and the male body by Mapplethorpe; the undervaluing of women artists, with special attention paid to Louise Bourgeois; and the extreme valuation of Jeff Koons. As she incisively considers works by filmmaker Wim Wenders, literary artist Karl Ove Knausgaard, and painter Anselm Kiefer, Hustvedt illuminates the dynamics of perception and the influence of expectation and context. As she delves ever more deeply into the mind/body, reason/passion, sex/gender splits, she parses the writings of such influential figures as Kierkegaard and Richard Dawkins and ponders her own mysterious synesthesia and the circular challenges of studying mental processes. Though these are erudite and intellectually sophisticated essays, Hustvedt is beguiling and wholly present in each lively, first-person, thrillingly interdisciplinary narrative as she scrutinizes human nature, especially the essential role emotion plays in memory, learning, empathy, morality, and art. Copyright 2016 Booklist Reviews.

A celebrated novelist most recently of The Blazing Word, a New York Times Notable Book that was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Hustvedt here explores in nonfiction topics she often explores in fiction, e.g., art, feminism, neuroscience, and how we perceive the world. The eponymous first part of this three-part volume of essays considers the perceptual and gender biases that apply as we judge art, literature, and the larger world. The second part, "The Delusions of Certainty," examines the putative split between the mental and the physical, while "What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition" looks at what neurological disorders have to tell us about ourselves.

Hustvedt's (The Blazing World; The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves) essays, written between 2011 and 2015, make for a weighty, thought-provoking collection. Divided into three sections, the anthology weaves science and the humanities together with a critical eye and a personal touch. The author's central claims throughout, whether writing about art or the mind/body problem, are "all human knowledge is partial" and everyone is influenced by her or his "community of thinkers or researchers." As a result, much of what is delivered by the media as truth or fact is open to question. And question Hustvedt does, leading readers from one idea to the next as she examines something as simple as a hairdo or as complex as memory and imagination. She even attempts to find an answer to the perennial query about where authors get their ideas. Verdict An excellent and fearlessly wide-ranging collection that never stops at the easy answer but continually probes deeper. Not for casual, comfort, or fluff reading, this title demands attention and thought, but the effort is rewarded. [See Prepub Alert, 6/19/16.]—Stefanie Hollmichel, Univ. of St. Thomas Law Lib., Minneapolis c) Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In this erudite collection, novelist Hustvedt (The Blazing World) explores philosophical questions central to the humanities using research from other disciplines, such as biology, feminist theory, and neuroscience. The questions relate to the self, epistemology, and art and literature, among other things. In the middle portion of the book, in an essay that ought to become canonical, Hustvedt examines the problematic underpinnings of current scientific fads such as evolutionary psychology and computational theory of mind. Her lengthy exercise in phenomenology provides a dense, succinct overview of the mind/body problem, which "has haunted Western philosophy since the Greeks." The questions that preoccupy Hustvedt are the questions of a novelist, but they take consciousness itself as their subject: Where do ideas come from? How do stories get created? What is reflective self-consciousness, and how is it formed? What role do imagination, emotion, memory, and the unconscious play in this thing we call mind? The book conveys the wide range of Hustvedt's reading as she focuses on the interstices between people; between disciplines; and between concepts such as art and science, truth and fiction, feeling and perception. The research is sound and the scholarship engaging, and the exacting prose turns humorous and almost warm when Hustvedt incorporates her personal reflections, exhibiting, as she says of the artist Louise Bourgeois, "a quick mind, interested above all in its own contents." (Dec.)