 Damasio's magical but realistic truth
For general readers, Damasio articulates complicated information with interest and charm. For therapists, it is a must in order to understand critical concepts in therapy and sort out differences in feeling and thinking.
 Neither a clear writer nor a clear thinker
I have just finished reading this book with a great sense of relief. I wish I could agree with all the complimentary things that other reviewers have written about it, but I find I can't. I am convinced that Damasio is an insightful neurologist, and his personal observations and extensive knowledge of patients with neurological conditions is valuable. However, he is neither a clear thinker nor a clear writer. He goes in for the poetic and artistic, and while his language may sound great, more than half the time I didn't know what the Hell he was actually trying to say. Here's an example: I literally opened the book at random and chose the first sentence I came on: "Knowing springs to life in the story, it inheres in the newly constructed neural pattern that constitutes the nonverbal account." If you think the meaning of that sentence would be clearer after you had read all the book that preceded it, you're wrong. I have read the entire book, and I still have only a vague idea what Damasio is trying to say here. When he is not being poetic, Damasio is technical. A card-carrying neuroscientist myself, I nevertheless struggled to understand some of Damasio's jargon.
More disturbing than the lack of clear expression was the lack of clear thinking. Damasio is often illogical and often contradicts himself. For instance, late in the book, he states, "The idea that the nature of subjective experience can be grasped effectively by the study of their behavioral correlates is wrong." In most of the chapters that precede this statement, however, he does exactly that. He describes what he supposes to be the subjective experience of neurological patients based on his observations of their behavior. He confidently states over and over again that this patient is conscious and that one is not, without ever clearly saying how he knows -- without defining the criteria on which he bases that judgment.
Perhaps I was spoiled, because just before reading this book I read Daniel Dennett's _Consciousness Explained_. The ideas in that book were intrinsically much more difficult to grasp, but they were stimulating, insightful, and expressed in a way that was both engaging and clear. I was sorry to reach the end of it. Reading Damasio, in contrast, was a punishment I forced myself to endure, and whose cessation is a relief.
Poorly Written
I read Descartes Error and found the author's writing style to be poor. Nevertheless, I figured I would give the author another chance by reading another one of his books. Unfortunately, I found this second book to be poorly written as well. The author is obviously passionate and knowledgeable about his subject of study - and I find no fault in his knowledge of the subject matter. But he is simply a very poor communicator!! His train of thought is meandering and rambling. So many of his points could have been expressed more succinctly - it was frustrating to read passages that were not "tight" and focused. At times I got the impression that the author "wrote" this book simply by dictating his idle thoughts into a dictaphone, and then having someone transcribe them. Also, his rambling writing style made the subject matter much more confusing and difficult to understand. To readers of this review, I would recommend a book titled The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux - this book covers similar topic areas as Antonio Damasio's books but the writing is so much better.
A seminal work
I very seldom come across a book that is so groundbreaking in its content as to make me determined to fully understand what the author is trying to convey (even if it means rereading it three times!) Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens is an astonishing achievement and I believe that the science of consciousness has been vastly enriched with this contribution.
It may help you to know, however, that this is by no means light reading. Even with my medical background, I struggled to keep up, especially the first time round. It probably helps reading Descartes' Error first, but you also need oodles of persistence. But then no thoughtful person ever expected a serious text on the neural underpinnings of consciousness to read like pop psychology. That said, I do think that Damasio's style has eased the burden of understanding considerably. His text is rich with metaphors and examples and I don't believe that anything is beyond the grasp of the enthusiastic lay reader.
In a nutshell, if you put in the effort with this book, you will be richly rewarded. And, as the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine said: '... you will be ahead of the ruck by at least a decade.'
 An engaging discussion of consciousness
I found this book to be an engaging exploration of consciousness and the different parameters that define consciousness. The author spends a lot of time explaining how consciousness is defined in relationship to the relationship the person has to the world, but also in regard to biological systems, linguistics, etc. He also does an excellent job of distinguishing where emotions fit into consciousness.
On the other hand, his writing style is dense and sometimes hard to get through. I had to carefully reread some of his writing to really get the ideas he was trying to explain...so be prepared to do some slogging.
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