Reviews and Press
Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia
"(Awarded) for his justly celebrated and important book, Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia....We need George Makari's vision and voice and we, the IPA,...congratulate him on his significant work and his ongoing vision for what psychoanalysis can be and do in the world."
- Winner, the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Prejudice Award, International Psychoanalytical Association, July, 2023
"Every year many superb books come out that describe episodes of racism...but fewer seem to understand racism as a phenomenon to be studied and analyzed...(T)his is the first history of the various theories...that people have tried to use to make sense of this unfortunate mindset that our species easily slips into. Of Fear and Strangers, the jury thought, is also beautifully written, with an absence of cliché and jargon, and replete with liveliness, wit, and original turns of phrase. The book is erudite and fascinating...by no means dry history."
- Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, Steven Pinker, Juror, April 5, 2022
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"One needn't share the thesis to be engrossed in this lively romp through psychiatry, biology, literature, and history."
- Bloomberg, "The 15 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2021," December 18, 2021
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"By shedding light on the trajectory of xenophobia during its 150-year old history, this skillfully written account helps to point us toward ways to combat it."
- The Washington Post, October 22, 2021
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\"...a compelling story of racial and ethnic animosity."
-The Wall Street Journal, October 23-24, 2021
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A psychiatrist and historian traces the evolution of xenophobia...while also identifying a humanist countercurrent, present, if often overlooked across the centuries."
- The New York Times, Editor's Choice, September 22, 2021
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"Riveting...a meditation on a subject that has vexed human society at least since the dawn of consciousness...weaves together a fascinating if powerfully disturbing series of examples of stranger hatred (and exploitation) alongside the internal dissent such encounters have always prompted."
- The New York Times, September 15, 2021
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"This important study by psychiatrist and historian Makari does not pull its punches."
-Martin Chilton, The Independent, August Books of the Month, 2021
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"(a) diverse and scholarly history of xenophobia."
Nature, August, 2021
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"(An) illuminating, significant historical study...A timely and thorough investigation of a cultural pkague."
- Kirkus Review (starred review) July 15, 2021
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Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind
"un essai monumental..."
-Yann Craus, L'Évolution psychiatrique, December 12, 2024
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"un libro realmente monumental por su erudition y su vasta ambición...una vision omnidisciplinar..."
- Pedro Cuartango, Best Non-Fiction of 2021, ABC Cultural, December 17, 2021
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"This book is a tour de force... The timeliness of this thoughtful and thought-provoking account makes it essential reading for our time."
- V. Krebs, Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 63, September, 2018
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"Soul Machine is George Makari's examination of the way we moved from conceptualising our core identity in terms of a soul to conceptualizing it in terms of a mind, It's a history not of psychiatry but of consciousness, magisterial, pellucid, and often wise."
- "Best Books of 2016," Andrew Solomon, The Guardian, November 28, 2016
"The history of that conundrum (between mind and brain) is delivered thoroughly and beautifully in George Makari's Soul Machine."
- Mary Bergstein, American Imago, Summer, 2017
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"Soul Machine is a treasure trove of insights, anecdotes, and stories… Makari's richly referential and strongly evocative book offers a multitude of historical perspectives and challenges."
- "Mr Spirit and Mr Flesh," Times Literary Supplement, November 16, 2016
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"In this brilliant mixture of history, philosophy and science, psychiatrist and historian George Makari explores the origins of our ideas about self and that ephemeral phenomenon, the mind. …Insightful, thought-provoking and encyclopaedic…"
- "Summer Reading," Nature, July, 2016.
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"Makari's book is a long but lively account of how ancient and religious conceptions of our inner life… gave way to the modern and secular conceptions of ourselves… It tells a story of radical reorientation and fundamental conceptual upheaval."
- "Groping Toward the Mind," a review by Colin McGinn, New York Review of Books, June 23, 2016
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"From Aristotle to Watson, views on mind, brain and soul have evolved. A brilliant new book adds perspective."
- "Constructing the Modern Mind," a review by Christof Koch, Scientific American Mind, May, 2016
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Of course, science needs to reconcile matter as much as mind. Makari fascinatingly traces the endless series of efforts…"
- "Minding the Gap," - The Tablet, April, 2016
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"This band of skeptics and the world they made are the subjects of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, George Makari’s book about man’s search for a natural, as opposed to spiritual, authority to guide him."
- "From Soul to Mind," Washington Free Beacon, March, 2016
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"In 'Soul Machine,' George Makari presents an electrifying narrative of the intellectual debates that gave rise to the Western conception of the mind."
- "Lost Souls," A Review of Soul Machine, The Economist, December 19, 2015
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"Makari believes modern men and women ‘must navigate between competing notions of their own being’. He shows how this fractured self-image came about by retelling European intellectual history from the mid-17th century through to the early 19th century. It’s an absorbing story, vast in scope and rich in quirky detail… Soul Machine is an illuminating account of changing ideas of the mind, told with verve and panache by a writer as deeply versed in the history of psychiatry as he is in philosophy and modern European culture."
- "Identity Checks," A Review of Soul Machine by John Gray, The Literary Review, December, 2015.
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"In Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, George Makari, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, explains the source of my tripartite childhood confusion. Soul Machine is a finely written story about the political, medical, theological, philosophical, scientific, and technological cauldron in which ideas about bodies, minds, and souls swirled…"
- "Troubles with Three-ism," Owen Flanagan on Soul Machine," The Los Angeles Book Review, November 28, 2015
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"Scientism, manifested most dismally in exaggerated claims about the capacity of neuroscience to explain (or explain away) human nature, is perhaps the most serious intellectual disease of our time. This is one of the many reasons why George Makari's brilliant, compendious "Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind" is essential reading. The story he tells so engagingly is of a vast, polyphonic argument about what it is to be a human being."
- "The Knot in the Universe," A Review of Soul Machine by Raymond Tallis, The Wall Street Journal, November7, 2015
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"In a brilliant new book, George Makari charts the ways Western thinkers have wrestled with questions of how the mind is related to the material world."
- "The Unending Search for the Soul," A Review of Soul Machine by Michael Roth, The Daily Beast, November 2, 2015
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"The remarkable achievement of George Makari's Soul Machine is to show how differently people have answered that question (of the mind) over time and how many of the ideas we take for granted about our own minds are relatively recent in origin… (T)his book succeeds where few others have."
- "Anyone Home? A Review of Soul Machine by T.M Luhrmann, The American Scholar, Fall, 2015
*Starred Review: "An impressively multifacted narrative... a probing historical inquiry."
~ Booklist, August 2015
*Starred Review: "Makari explores and defends the concept of mind...This in-depth survey of history, psychology, and philosophy doesn't presume but provides insight and expertise to general readers as well as scholars."
~ Library Journal, August, 2015
"Makari ... humaniz(es) the great thinkers of the past with the vibrant detail of characters in a novel. For all its length, this history of the elusive concept that defines human identity is consistently, startingly immediate."
~ Publisher's Weekly
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"An erudite book that reveals how and why the understanding of consciousness still eludes us."
~ Kirkus Review
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"Between 1600 and 1815, the place where mental stuff happened... came to seem more and more important, as George Makari, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, explains in his forthcoming book, "Soul Machine the Invention of the Modern Mind."
~ T.M Luhrmann, "The Anxious Americans," New York Times, July 18, 2015
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Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis
"Revolution in Mind is a magisterial study that moves beyond the heated disputes of past decades to give us a detailed, deeply reflective history of the movement of ideas that too often lie buried beneath the battle over Freud's iconic status. It also shows how the paradox of creating a science of human subjectivity was enmeshed in the ferment of a Europe that ended with the tragedy of second world war."
~ The Financial Times
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"Deep into this lucid history of the rise of psychoanalysis, George Makari cites a tribute an acolyte sent Freud for his 60th birthday in 1916. “Beware ... when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet,” he wrote. “Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.” Makari doesn’t cite Freud’s somewhat morose response: “Only a funeral oration at the Central Cemetery is normally as beautiful and affectionate.”"
~ The New York Times
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"This is a magnificent book, both panoramic and encyclopedic in scope. It embraces the creation of a powerful 20th-century body of thought, psychoanalysis, that is presumedly the best and probably the most comprehensive and coherent system known for understanding the inner workings of the human mind. "
~ Journal of the American Medical Association
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"Author George Makari must have very little time on his hands. He is an associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College, an adjunct associate professor at Rockefeller University, and he is on the faculty of Columbia University’s Psychoanalytic Center. Yet, he has also managed to write a terrific new history of psychoanalysis from the late 19th century to the post-World War II years. It’s enough to hurt your ego."
~ The New York Post
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"Makari's work, Revolution in Mind, presents readers with the opportunity to reconsider and compare the manner in which the history of psychoanalysis has been understood in France and English-speaking countries until now. In demonstrating how the birth of psychoanalysis constituted a legitimate revolution of scientific thought and addressed questions left unanswered by philosophy and human sciences in the middle of the 19th century, G. Makari offers a new historiography of psychoanalysis."
~ Psychoanalysis and History
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"Revolution in Mind is a magisterial study that moves beyond the heated disputes of past decades to give us a detailed, deeply reflective history of the movement of ideas that too often lie buried beneath the battle over Freud's iconic status. It also shows how the paradox of creating a science of human subjectivity was enmeshed in the ferment of a Europe that ended with the tragedy of second world war."
~ The Financial Times
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"Deep into this lucid history of the rise of psychoanalysis, George Makari cites a tribute an acolyte sent Freud for his 60th birthday in 1916. “Beware ... when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet,” he wrote. “Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.” Makari doesn’t cite Freud’s somewhat morose response: “Only a funeral oration at the Central Cemetery is normally as beautiful and affectionate.”"
~ The New York Times
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"This is a magnificent book, both panoramic and encyclopedic in scope. It embraces the creation of a powerful 20th-century body of thought, psychoanalysis, that is presumedly the best and probably the most comprehensive and coherent system known for understanding the inner workings of the human mind. "
~ Journal of the American Medical Association
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"Author George Makari must have very little time on his hands. He is an associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College, an adjunct associate professor at Rockefeller University, and he is on the faculty of Columbia University’s Psychoanalytic Center. Yet, he has also managed to write a terrific new history of psychoanalysis from the late 19th century to the post-World War II years. It’s enough to hurt your ego."
~ The New York Post
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"Makari's work, Revolution in Mind, presents readers with the opportunity to reconsider and compare the manner in which the history of psychoanalysis has been understood in France and English-speaking countries until now. In demonstrating how the birth of psychoanalysis constituted a legitimate revolution of scientific thought and addressed questions left unanswered by philosophy and human sciences in the middle of the 19th century, G. Makari offers a new historiography of psychoanalysis."
~ Psychoanalysis and History
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