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David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel. Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-Year Collaboration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. viii + 729 pp. 111. $49.50 (0-19-517618-9).
David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who engaged in a remarkably long-lasting and extremely productive collaboration crowned by a shared Nobel Prize in 1981, shaped our current understanding of visual perception. A detailed account of their collaboration would have been another noteworthy achievement, this time in the historiography of twentieth-century neuroscience. The title of their book, however, is slightly misleading: following two brief biographical sketches describing their respective entries into the world of science, and four short chapters on the scientific background and specifics of their collaboration, the volume is made up of twenty-six reprints of their papers, starting with the first coauthored one from 1959 and ending with their Nobel Lectures. Reminiscent of nineteenth-century editions of the...