Bibliography
A Short History of England - G.K. Chesterton
I've never read any Chesterton, and a while back someone recommended A Short History of England. There are some sections which are simply divine prose, like reading liquid honey. Other sections, I'm afraid, are more cloying. Chesterton's principle is that history is best judged by the figures who stick in folk memory and People's History, not necessarily lists of kings and facts and dates and battles. It's an emotive history, a history where sentiment and opinion and how a civilization remembers things matters more than what actually happened. I am... not entirely convinced by this, for obvious disciplinary-related reasons. I'm also not entirely taken by Chesterton's rhetorical style, which relies heavily upon an assumed knowledge of English history which is not as strong as it should be for me as a reader. I worked out what the problem was about half-way through - he doesn't drop in enough 'so-and-so, you know so-and-so, the chap who...' signposts, which means he refers to names and people without actually explaining who they are or indeed whether he's mentioned them before, which in the mire of the sixteenth century is not actually an aid to understanding.
I'm glad to have read it, as there's some lovely prose and it's an interesting artefact of a way of viewing the world in 1917, but at the same time, I do think I might have started instead with some Father Brown.
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference - Cordelia Fine
Oh, this was brilliant. Fine basically goes 'so, you know how there's all this stuff about what girls' brains and boys' brains can do that's woven into the popular science literature and is now leaching into the way the school curriculum's designed? LET'S CRITIQUE THAT.' She does a brilliant job of looking at the Actual Damn Science, thinking about the limitations of the research, the problems of studying gender as a Socially Constructed Thing, the disproportionate influence of cues in modifying behaviour, the massive inaccuracies in most neuroscience experiments, and then bangs her head against the Wall of Stupid that is popular science reporting of this really, really complicated stuff.
I read this with great interest, because I know a little bit about neuroscience and what little I know had always seemed to me to be that it is a science in its infancy and can't tell a lot about why bits of the brain do what they do. I was right. They can't. Also, the right brain/left brain theory about gender was exploded years ago. AND YET it's still being peddled as a Thing! Argh. So frustrating.
The majorly interesting thing I came away with, though, was the idea of people putting on personas, and this was in the context of whether a participant in a research study was primed to think of themselves in a gendered way and if this had an effect on their performance. In maths tests, apparently, some studies show that women primed to think of themselves as women (rather than, say, students at a selective college) do worse on tests than men, or indeed than women primed with another identity. That says a hell of a lot about what our subconscious states do to our participation and function in society - and a lot about the power of how information and assessment is presented in priming student achievement. Because men who were told that by virtue of being men they would perform badly on a test did exactly that, in contrast with men not primed that way. It cuts both ways - and it's a fascinating idea.
Anyway. Go read the book. I'm summarising poorly and it's bloody brilliant.
I've never read any Chesterton, and a while back someone recommended A Short History of England. There are some sections which are simply divine prose, like reading liquid honey. Other sections, I'm afraid, are more cloying. Chesterton's principle is that history is best judged by the figures who stick in folk memory and People's History, not necessarily lists of kings and facts and dates and battles. It's an emotive history, a history where sentiment and opinion and how a civilization remembers things matters more than what actually happened. I am... not entirely convinced by this, for obvious disciplinary-related reasons. I'm also not entirely taken by Chesterton's rhetorical style, which relies heavily upon an assumed knowledge of English history which is not as strong as it should be for me as a reader. I worked out what the problem was about half-way through - he doesn't drop in enough 'so-and-so, you know so-and-so, the chap who...' signposts, which means he refers to names and people without actually explaining who they are or indeed whether he's mentioned them before, which in the mire of the sixteenth century is not actually an aid to understanding.
I'm glad to have read it, as there's some lovely prose and it's an interesting artefact of a way of viewing the world in 1917, but at the same time, I do think I might have started instead with some Father Brown.
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference - Cordelia Fine
Oh, this was brilliant. Fine basically goes 'so, you know how there's all this stuff about what girls' brains and boys' brains can do that's woven into the popular science literature and is now leaching into the way the school curriculum's designed? LET'S CRITIQUE THAT.' She does a brilliant job of looking at the Actual Damn Science, thinking about the limitations of the research, the problems of studying gender as a Socially Constructed Thing, the disproportionate influence of cues in modifying behaviour, the massive inaccuracies in most neuroscience experiments, and then bangs her head against the Wall of Stupid that is popular science reporting of this really, really complicated stuff.
I read this with great interest, because I know a little bit about neuroscience and what little I know had always seemed to me to be that it is a science in its infancy and can't tell a lot about why bits of the brain do what they do. I was right. They can't. Also, the right brain/left brain theory about gender was exploded years ago. AND YET it's still being peddled as a Thing! Argh. So frustrating.
The majorly interesting thing I came away with, though, was the idea of people putting on personas, and this was in the context of whether a participant in a research study was primed to think of themselves in a gendered way and if this had an effect on their performance. In maths tests, apparently, some studies show that women primed to think of themselves as women (rather than, say, students at a selective college) do worse on tests than men, or indeed than women primed with another identity. That says a hell of a lot about what our subconscious states do to our participation and function in society - and a lot about the power of how information and assessment is presented in priming student achievement. Because men who were told that by virtue of being men they would perform badly on a test did exactly that, in contrast with men not primed that way. It cuts both ways - and it's a fascinating idea.
Anyway. Go read the book. I'm summarising poorly and it's bloody brilliant.