Curious Behavior by Robert R Provine (Harvard, £18.95)
Why do we yawn, tickle, laugh, cough, scratch, sneeze, hiccup, vomit, or cry? Over the years, Provine has investigated these and other behaviours in the lab and on the street, and the result is beautifully written and constantly surprising. Provine is a neuroscientist who scorns neural reductionism; he refuses to talk down to his readers, actively encouraging them to perform their own experiments; and he is charmingly funny, dotting his exegesis with laconic flashes of thematic silliness or amused humility. "My reputation as a yawn sleuth," he writes, "has conferred a curious kind of charisma – I've become a yawn stimulus."
A major theme of the book is contagion. Why, for example, are yawns contagious? (Why is even reading about yawning likely to make you yawn? Are you yawning yet? Yawn.) Provine also suspects that many of the behaviours he studies are means of communication. "Tears resolve ambiguity of facial expression", and even "breathing is grammatical" – coughing or laughing generally occur at syntactic breaks in speech. Provine also considers farts as "buttspeak", using the example of the celebrated French fartiste Le Pétomane to ask seriously why we didn't evolve the faculty of speech via the anus, and so giving a whole new meaning to talking out of one's arse.
Satisfaction Not Guaranteed by Peter Stearns (NYU Press, £23.99)
Sneezing and yawning, Provine notes, can provide "satisfaction" (yawning apparently can even trigger orgasm in some people: try this at home) – which is just as well, since little else in life today does. Given the enormous advances over the last few centuries in agriculture, medicine, education and so forth, this author asks, why aren't we happier in our "modern condition"?
The "satisfaction gap", Stearns argues, arises from various factors not yet eliminated by modernising forces (major stressors such as war) or actually created by them: the disorienting effects of constant change; the monstrous hegemony of clock time; the cruel injunction to be happy; meaningless and oversupervised work in modern jobs; medicalised death; anxiety over "correct" child-rearing; and the inability of shopping really to help. The book is dry but interestingly nuanced, encouraging us to see our flawed modernity as a "work in progress". In Victorian times, Stearns relates, "Nervous middle-class people now learned that having sex too often, possibly more than once a week, could induce premature death or insanity." One hopes that at least they yawned a lot.
Grammar for Grown-Ups by Katherine Fry & Rowena Kirton (Square Peg, £10.99)
It comes decorated with a blurb from that celebrated literary stylist Alastair Campbell, but this guide doesn't inspire confidence when, on the first page, it disobeys its own rules on hyphenating compound adjectives (speaking of "not so common errors" and "not so basic grammar"), and ascribes to itself a wan optimism ("This book […] hopefully shows that good grammar" is important).
Most of the explanations of parts of speech, punctuation ("the written equivalent of the satnav") and so forth are competent if yawn-inducing; the book will sate potential readers' hunger for lists of homonyms, American vocabulary or misspellings. Some of its preferences, though, are mysterious – "There is no such time" as 12am or 12pm, the authors declare, insisting (with reckless pleonasm) on "12 noon" or "12 midnight". And, as always with style guides that offer lists of "commonly confused words", one wonders just how common they are. Does anyone mix up "eschatology" and "scatology", or is that just more buttspeak?
