Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian:
Into this bewildering terrain [the philosophical issue of free will] steps the celebrated behavioural scientist Robert Sapolsky, who sets out in Determined to banish free will once and for all – and to show that confronting its nonexistence needn’t condemn us to amorality or despair. It’s only one aspect of the book’s strangeness that he does this in a style that often calls to mind a hugely knowledgable yet stoned west coast slacker. (I’m still recovering from his reaction, in a book crammed with footnotes and diagrams of motor neurons, to the conclusion that we don’t control our lives: “Fuck. That really blows.”)
His strategy is an ambitious one: to track every link of the causal chain that culminates in human behaviour, starting with what’s happening in the brain in the final few milliseconds before we act, all the way back to how our brains are shaped by early experiences, and even before that, all mostly at the fine-grained level of neurotransmitters and genes.
More here.