About book The Woman Who Dived Into The Heart Of The World (2010)
Taken from the point of view of an autistic woman, Karen (which took me a really long time to remember her name since it is first person perspective and she always capitalizes Me), the book looks at how human beings think about what make them human. Two major points of reference she draws on time and time again are Descartes and Darwin. Her major problem with Descartes is his famous phrase "I think; therefore, I am," which she finds impossibly stupid. And I agree with her. She's convinced me wholeheartedly. First, you exist and then you think. Descartes uses this idea to define reality. A reality in which anything that thinks must exist more than anything that does not think. Thus, animals are inferior to humans, which allows us to eat them and kill them with little concern for them. The book goes to great, and subtle, lengths to convince the reader that things, humans and animals, exist first and then learn to think. Karen loves Darwin. He went outside of himself, unlike Descartes, and discovered a reality of how humans became humans and how all the animals became the animals they are. She much prefers this reality because it connects her to the animals (this case that humans and monkeys have a common ancestor). However, once again, human have perverted his message and made the phrase "survival of the fittest" famous, irregardless of his true hypothesis. Darwin has so much more to say about compassion and cooperation than strife and competition. Obviously, what I find most interesting about the book was her redefinition of what a human is. But there are so many more elements to this story that are rich and make this book a worthwhile read. Since Karen is autistic, the reader gets a better understanding of what autism is (keyword: better), as well as a more complete picture of what the meat and fish industries are doing to the environment and to the animals themselves, though the book is not an account of the atrocities of the meat and fish corporations. The book was also really well written and used a language that I could relate to and become emotionally connected with. This book is the first that I've read that has come even close to convincing me to become a vegetarian. The only thing I wish was different was that I didn't want this book to be a novel. I am definitely going to read more books by this author. Karen (Me)is an autistic girl who lives with an aunt who runs the family tuna business which has fallen on hard times as a result of a U.S. embargo on Mexican caught and canned tuna. Although thought to be somewhere on the old scale of idiot to imbecile, Karen does have a few exceptional abilities that her Aunt Isabelle is able to recognize and nurture. With echoes of the Temple Grandin story, it is a good story. It will make you ponder the human condition.
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I will never look at tuna the same way again.
—bianca
