Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics

  • Rick Shenkman
Basic (2016) 9780465033003 | ISBN: 978-0-4650-3300-3

Politics often seems an arena for the irrational, in which drought can affect voting and candidates' egregious faults are ignored by die-hard fans. Journalist Rick Shenkman sees the cause as a poor fit between our Palaeolithic brains and today's knotted complexities. He liberally draws on psychology (from the likes of Daniel Kahneman) and political science to isolate four key failings among voters, including inept 'readings' of politicians. If democratic reform is to succeed, he argues, we must begin with self-reform.

Why We Snap: Understanding the Rage Circuit in Your Brain

  • R. Douglas Fields
Dutton (2016) 9780525954835 | ISBN: 978-0-5259-5483-5

The tug of a pickpocket lifting his wallet spurred neurobiologist Douglas Fields to pin the man to the pavement — then motivated him to decode the brain's “rage circuitry”. Synthesizing his own and others' research and scores of case studies, Fields argues that many apparently inexplicable cases of violent rage are down to a clash between hard-wiring in the brain's hypothalamus, amygdala and limbic system, and nine rage triggers, from life-or-death situations to threats to social order. He shows, too, how factors such as chronic stress can lower that flashpoint. Cogent and timely.

Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England

  • Caroline Grigson
Oxford University Press (2016) 9780198714705 | ISBN: 978-0-1987-1470-5

Hyenas roamed medieval Oxfordshire, reveals zoologist Caroline Grigson in this incisive chronicle of exotic visitations to England's shores. These and other animals in Henry I's park were a precursor to the Tower of London menagerie, which by the thirteenth century boasted a polar bear that swam in the Thames. The acquisition of wild beasts, initially the whim of status-hungry monarchs and a by-product of exploration, later became a public obsession and a focus for natural historians such as Hans Sloane — while the flood of monkeys and apes prompted early stirrings of evolutionary thought.

Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

  • Jo Marchant
Crown (2016) 9780385348157 9780857868626 | ISBN: 978-0-3853-4815-7

Science writer Jo Marchant probes the impact of mental states on physical health in this well-researched study of “mind–body medicine”. There is much compelling science here, such as the emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology; and reminders of the negative effects of stress and poverty on health are salutary. However, the attention paid to often expensive alternative practices acknowledged by Marchant as unscientific sits oddly next to less controversial techniques — and the documented (and cheaper) benefits for low mood of a walk in the woods fail to feature.

Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places

  • Anna Pavord
Bloomsbury (2016) 9781408868911 | ISBN: 978-1-4088-6891-1

The bosky glories of the British landscape were 'born', culturally, in the eighteenth century, and soon celebrated by luminaries such as Thomas Gainsborough and William Wordsworth. Anna Pavord traces their paths, skipping across scapes and interweaving a supple narrative of her own experience of place from Wales to Cumbria. Adding earthiness to lyricism are passages by agricultural writers such as William Cobbett of Rural Rides (1830), who abhorred the enclosure of common land, and Arthur Young, who supported it.