The Echo Maker: Richard Powers

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The Echo Maker offered some conversation pieces and several writing prompts, but any impact will fade quickly. It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Nestled in his dapper success, cozy in his 30-year marriage, Weber possesses a kind of spiritual ease completely alien to the Schluter siblings. Weber recognizes Mark as a rare case of Capgras Syndrome, a doubling delusion, and eagerly investigates. There is so much more that one of this novel's chief delights is how elegantly Powers weaves vast amounts of information into a cohesive whole.

This book was long, boring, rambling and had one plot twist that was moderately interesting, but didn't show up until about page 400 (out of 450). Karin takes up with an old friend who is involved in a green initiative to save the local river basin from business investors.He is then the first diagnosed case of Capgras syndrome sustained from injury rather than psychiatric etiology. Kearny, Nebraska is a way station on the central flyway, a place where thousands of cranes congregate every year on their way north and south, providing an industry for the town. In The Echo Maker, Powers hopes to plumb the nature of consciousness, and he does so with such alert passion that we come to recognize in his quest the novel’s abiding theme—What it means to be human will forever elude us. His friends Duane and Rupp, who may have had something to do with the accident, are even worse, something of an excuse for the degenerate path that Mark has chosen in life.

If you spent a week reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat while watching the Hallmark Channel, you might end up writing this novel.Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion. Accumulating fresh insights into the human brain, the doctor sees Mark as a living embodiment of his theories. Everything gets worked out by the end of the book, except that none of the main characters remain the same as they used to be.

Yet another level down to the neurons, the coldly scientific chemical reactions (eg -- Bonnie's distress at reading about the God module and the belief switch) and then in a circle back to the origin of everything, the chemical spark which created life in a single cell. His books seem wrought rather than written, and try as he might, he can't help but make you feel just that little bit stupid.Nor does the book open in the anxious days after the attack, with the characters wandering the white, deserted streets and wondering, “How can I ever go back to my superficial preoccupations over high-thread-count sheets / that new S. Neither Sacks nor his readers (Full disclosure: I love Sacks' books; his recent autobiography, Uncle Tungsten, is one of the finest I've read. I think the writing style, together with my feelings about the characters, made it feel a little bit like I was plodding through a gray story, from one gem section about cranes or neuroscience to another.