There has been a recent flurry in adaptations of classic novels. Call me Ishmael, a retelling of Moby Dick and Julia, a retelling of 1984, come to mind as two notable examples. However, I would not say they are necessary (an overused word describing and praising books but in this case perhaps justified) in the same way as Percival Everett's James is. James is a recreation of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the slave. In many ways this perspective is far more interesting, the narrative and complications for Jim having much larger and more egregious repercussions than Finn's.

The contrast is captured in the framing of both of their journeys. For Finn, his journey is an adventure, for Jim it is a terrfying experience of trying to survive. Jim incidentally, is actually called James. His name is deliberately simplified by his white slave owners but also by James himself. Everett introduces one of the novel's most incisive twists. James and the other Black characters consciously suppress their intelligence in the presence of white people, performing ignorance, mispronunciation, and intellectual limitation as a survival strategy.

This enforced performance captures the outward suppression of Black intellectual life under slavery. Everett makes explicit what history has often left implicit, where many of the stereotypes surrounding Black elocution and pronunciation were not expressions of incapacity, but adaptive disguises produced under white domination. The horrific irony is that these caricatures, fabricated through oppression, were later taken as evidence of the inferiority that oppression had imposed (an insight he explored brilliantly in his earlier book Erasure). of trying to survive.

James goes through the implications of his being caught once he runs away and in his imaginings you truly feel the full force of entrenched racism in America through his knowledge and fear. The book is interspersed with humour - characteristic of Everett and reminiscent of Twain (Everett reportedly read Huckleberry 13 times to capture Twain's style and wit). This humour is an attempt, a sort of antidote, to live - specifically, on how to live and cope in a world where you are viewed as less than 'other'.

Husserl, the phenomenologist, postulated that experience provides a kind of first-person knowledge that is irreducible and inaccessible from a third-person perspective. Each of our 'qualia' is unique to us, and so the best we have at understanding the conditions and experience of another - that is, their epistemology - is through, among other things, great works of literature. James is a book that draws you closer to an understanding of what it really meant to live as a Black person in 1830s America. However, we must be fully aware that this is an understanding that we can fundamentally never fully grasp. In Nagel's What it is like to be a bat, he brilliantly argues subjective experience cannot be fully captured by objective science. Attempting to bridge this chasm with speculation and misrepresentation only further entrenches existing racial prejudices.

Sometimes the best way to become informed on a subject is to read its history. Historicism's continual pull comes from its ability to provide a great and needed contextual understanding of a topic. This can partly explain the trend of works received with great receptivity in various disciplines possessing the title 'a history of'. Take Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy as just one example. With this in mind, The Idea of the Brain provides a brilliant understanding of how our concepts of the mind have evolved historically, whilst interweaving modern thinking regarding the brain and where the future for neuroscience research may lie.

A book in modern neuroscience can sometimes become outdated, not in core concepts - these are for the most part fundamentally agreed upon - but in discussions of new research, due to the pace at which neuroscience research occurs. This book is not one of those, exactly due to its historic approach. Taking the view of Hegel, our need to understand ourselves comes in part from our history, and so what better way to achieve this than to combine history with the organ that dictates what and who we are.