The Kingdom of Infinite Space by Raymond Tallis

It was the title that seduced me. "The Kingdom of Infinite Space" - subtitled "A portrait of your head". Yet it was not the exploration of the mind-brain duality that I'd presumed. No, the book is unfortunately more of a novelty act - a treatise on the head that attempts to ignore the brain as much as humanly possible. This leaves the reader dealing with a polemic of the various inputs and outputs of the heads. Sounds, sights, touches, tastes and smells vie for attention with mucus, saliva, ear wax, and tears. All that was missing was an ode to a pimple.

Mr. Tallis is also an earnest philosopher who shyly disguises his thoughts behind silly chapter titles like "A first truly philosophical digression" or the like. Combined with his penchant for incomprehensible (to me) Briticisms and unavoidable "heady" puns, it becomes hard to take his writing seriously. Apart from a semi-passionate (and thus semi-entertaining) rant left for the last chapter on the "location of thought", this book truly headed off in mostly wrong directions.