Defending the Cavewoman: And Other Tales of Evolutionary Neurology [Hardcover]

Harold L. Klawans MD (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393048314 | ISBN-13: 978-0393048315 | Publication Date: January 2000 | Edition: 1

During the neurologist Harold Klawan's lifetime, patients came to him from all over America, exhibiting a huge array of troubles, all of which boiled down to one complaint: something was wrong with their brains. As a sympathetic brain detective, Klawans deduced a great deal from his patients, not only about the immediate causes of their ailments but also about the evolutionary underpinnings of their behaviour. This book contains the richest of his clinical tails. He examines a woman suffering from "painful foot and moving toe syndrome", whose case remined him that we were once reptiles with brains at the bases of our spines. He discusses with his friend Oliver Sacks his own experience of knocking a recently broken toe with allowed him to see that, while the brain dulls pain, it also block position sense, so that an accident is likely to occur again to the part of the body that was previously hurt.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"All superficial comparisons to the contrary, Oliver Sacks and I are really quite dissimilar," said Dr. Harold Klawans, in his essay "My Lunch with Oliver." He and Sacks were both neurologists, both with special interests in movement disorders and Parkinson's disease, and both writers. "The brain and how it functions is to Oliver a philosophical issue... I try to ask simple questions." Klawans's questions are not really "simple," but they're about evolution and development instead of philosophy.

In his clinical practice, Klawans thought about the evolution of the brain to try to understand his patients' problems, and vice versa. His theme throughout is that brain development is about windows of opportunity: many things can only be learned in certain periods, and after puberty in particular the brain has been largely "pruned to shape," so that skills like language and music may never be properly acquired.

The cavewoman of the title is the one who stayed home taking care of the babies while Man the Hunter was off spearheading the Ascent of Man (in what Stephen Jay Gould, one of Klawans's favorite writers, calls an "evolutionary just-so story"). Not so, says Klawans: because the window of opportunity for learning language is in childhood, especially early childhood, language must have arisen between mothers and children: "though few defend the Cavewoman, we all speak our mother's tongue." --Mary Ellen Curtin

From Publishers Weekly

Much in the manner of Oliver Sacks, neurologist Klawans (Why Michael Couldn't Hit, etc.) uses stories from his clinical practice as jumping-off points for discussion of how the brain works, and of how and why it evolved as it did. Klawans explains how doctors find out which half of your brain controls your speech, and why they might need to know; how a professor's stroke cost him his ability to read, and how he regained it. Later chapters lay out "how literacy changes the brain" (among other things, it teaches us to use abstract categories) and how mad cow disease alters it (by means of contagious proteins called prions). Bringing in modern European history, Klawans connects an obscure nerve disease to conditions in Nazi-occupied Norway. Straying into evolutionary genetics, he describes Cheddar Man, a specimen of early Homo sapiens found in England; his DNA matches that of a modern-day history teacher still living in Cheddar. The difference between the two Cheddar men shows how much human life has been controlled by cultural, rather than biological, evolution. Klawans strikes an admirable balance between breezy narrative and serious exposition, between clinician's anecdote and broad biological overview. His decision to build each chapter around a single patient gives some of his work the feel of short stories, each with a single scientific punch line. Readers familiar with similar science writers will zip through Klawans's work with pleasure; those new to the genre will learn lots of neuroscience, nontechnically and without pain. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393048314
• ISBN-13: 978-0393048315
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,256,300 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars truly masterly, March 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Defending the Cavewoman: And Other Tales of Evolutionary Neurology (Hardcover)

Dr. Klawans was one of the last true Renaissance men of the 20th century--someone who's equally at home in the worlds of medicine, science, literature, painting, music, and, by God, even baseball! I'm really, really very sorry to learn that he has passed away last year, especially since I've been following at some remove his book-publishing career, and I had always been somewhat upset that he had never quite achieved the worldwide fame as he no doubt deserved. In many ways, I truly believe he's as brilliant and erudite as Oliver Sacks. With the immediate success of "Defending the Cavewoman," I was extremely happy to know that Dr. Klawans has finally been recognized as one of our finest science writers around. This book is--dare I say it--a crowning achievement of a distinguished career, as it sums up, in fascinating case study after case study, an entire life devoted to solving the intricate puzzles of neurology, the human mind, or perhaps I should just simply say the miracle of life. Who but Dr.Klawans could have taught us, with such elegance and charm, just why, among many, many other things, it's biologically natural for people to hate watching foreign films (because the brain isn't wired to read subtitles and absorb images at the same time!), why a pretentious literary professor suddenly lost his ability to read French and English but could still read Hebrew (because Hebrew reads from right to left, rather than the left-to-right of English and French: to learn more about how this works you simply have to read the book). If you have never heard of or read Dr. Klawans before, I strongly recommend that you begin with this book. I think you'll agree with me, after just dipping a little into the book, that with the passing of Harold Klawans the world has lost a brilliant mind, a caring doctor, a cultivated gentleman, and an amazing writer. (I don't know him personally but yet I think I can vouch for these qualities just from reading his books.)

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding book, January 31, 2000

By 

M. Boonstra - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Defending the Cavewoman: And Other Tales of Evolutionary Neurology (Hardcover)

This book is a real gem. Clinical stories are woven together with a neurological approach. In this book, I met some of the most fascinating cases involving the brain and behavior. I would think almost anybody could enjoy this book, and learn a great deal about how important our biology is in forming who we are and how we evolved, without ignoring individual differences and the environment. Klawans was not afraind to tackle the "big" questions like evolution of the mind/brain and bring them to the lay reader in such as fun way!

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful!, January 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Defending the Cavewoman: And Other Tales of Evolutionary Neurology (Hardcover)

...especially the chapter on the three hundred retired welders with careers of exposure to manganese dust, only <<some>> of whom developed the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Reading this book is like having a dinner conversation with a good friend who has seen the world we live in much, much more clearly than most.