The Master and His Emissary
The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

This will be a lengthy review, but no less than is deserved. You may even feel, after this review, that you have no need to read the book! This would be a mistake - all I am doing here is summarising in very broad terms, and giving some of my own thoughts on McGilchrist's opus. This is certainly the......more

I'm being a bit harsh giving this 3 stars because it is a really good book and everyone should read it. But there are inherent flaws on Iain's arguments that I cannot come to terms with. The first being that he treats the Right Brain as superior to the Left brain (the master and the emissary), which......more

Close to the end of this book, Iain McGilchrist is dissing an inferior bard when he quips (paraphrased) ‘their borrowings made the book sparkle like a magpies nest’. McGilchrist took 20 years to research this book. The sheer volume of absolutely marvelous source material make it shimmer like an ange......more

Ian McGilchrist's thick book on the "divided brain" is the most interesting book I've read this year. I'd come to regard the fabled right brain/left brain antithesis as so much entertaining pop psychology (e.g., Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind) — handy for provoking corporate robots, but hardly more......more

Note to self: The first chapters are a real slog to get through, with a litany of neurobiological and psychological differences between the left and right hemispheres, but after McGilchrist sets down all the facts as he found them, it's a fascinating read. Though he repeatedly cautions the reader th......more