Love In Cyberia

Many lives and stories interest in this compelling novel: the passionate Mattie Jones bears a horrifying secret; Tama Mananui makes the most of an arranged marriage with a woman twenty years older; Nani Paora holds the key to the past and a history filled with bloodshed: and his grandson Pene may well be the key to future.

Jimmy Conway always wanted to be famous. As a teenager he even stashed away a series of letters advising his future self on how to handle all the fame and fortune coming his way. And so when he’s reunited wih these rather embracing predictions in his mid-thirties he can’t help feeling he must be a bit of a disappointment to himself.

How is it that we can recognize photos from our high school yearbook decades later, but cannot remember what we ate for breakfast yesterday? And why are we inclined to buy more cans of soup if the sign says “LIMIT 12 PER CUSTOMER” rather than “LIMIT 4 PER CUSTOMER?” In Kluge, Gary Marcus argues convincingly that our minds are not as elegantly designed as we may believe. The imperfections result from a haphazard evolutionary process that often proceeds by piling new systems on top of old ones—and those systems don’t always work well together. The end product is a “kluge,” a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. Taking us on a tour of the essential areas of human experience—memory, belief, decision making, language, and happiness—Marcus unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the evolution of the human mind and simultaneously sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.