Neither author is an authority in any of the subjects addressed in the book, and they admit that it is a vanity project. In some cases, the lack of research into brain chemistry/neuroscience and behavioral psychology is obvious and leads authors to draw spurious conclusions or to miss obvious explanations. They clearly had a point of view and set out to justify it, and they generally seem to have a pessimistic and even disdainful perspective on numerous human institutions that distracts from the occasional interesting insight or example provided. The narrator read the book like he had a chip on his shoulder and was deigning to provide this information to the rest of us under protest. Perhaps a different tone or a different narrator would have improved this audiobook, but there just wasn’t enough substance or anything really insightful to justify the length of this book, IMO.
Review from The Elephant in the Brain →