This book is a series of essays about how the work certain artists (Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Paul Cezanne, et al.) precurse the modern findings of neuroscience. At the bottom of the books themes is the idea that art reaches the "self" of people, their character, their decision making, their essential being, while science explains what physical things are going on. Science can explain how things work, but it can't cross the line to get at how people have a sense of themselves and how their deeper emotions are expressed through paintings, music, literature, and even cuisine. It's an interesting book, but not a knockout. But thanks to it, I am better able to understand the buzz behind works by Cezanne and Virginia Woolf.

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