The Master and His Emissary — Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist's 2009 book advances an ambitious argument: that the two hemispheres of the human brain attend to the world in genuinely different ways, and that Western culture has, over centuries, drifted toward an overreliance on the mode of attention characteristic of the left hemisphere at the expense of the right.

The book is unfashionably long, richly footnoted, and takes seriously the possibility that neuroscience might have something to say about the shape of Western intellectual history. Both halves of that project have earned criticism. The first — the neuroscience of hemispheric difference — is more empirically defensible than the popular left-brain/right-brain caricature but more contested than McGilchrist sometimes acknowledges.

The second — the cultural diagnosis — is provocative and worth engaging with even where one disagrees. Few contemporary books attempt anything on this scale. Fewer still succeed at making the attempt feel worthwhile.