My Book of the Moment

Ideas: A History From Fire To Freud by Peter Watson

In my ongoing quest to make sense of life, I found this book at the library a few weeks back. It's a thick tome (1015 pages in paperback not including the index) but taken in small bites, it is very edible!

From The New Statesman review:

" ... a universal history of ideas seems an impossibly daunting project. Yet in Ideas: a history from fire to Freud, Watson gives us an astonishing overview of human intellectual development which covers everything from the emergence of language to the discovery of the unconscious, including the idea of the factory and the invention of America, the eclipse of the idea of the soul in 19th-century materialism and the continuing elusiveness of the self. In a book of such vast scope, a reader could easily get lost, but the narrative has a powerful momentum. Watson holds to a consistently naturalistic philosophy in which humanity is seen as an animal species developing in the material world. For him, human thought develops as much in response to changes in the natural environment - such as shifts in climate and the appearance of new diseases - as from any internal dynamism of its own. This overarching perspective informs and unifies the book, and the result is a masterpiece of historical writing."

It is a long and slow read, given the amount of information to be absorbed, but it is utterly stimulating and I am loving it. Read the full New Statesman review here.