A thoughtful, always interesting look into the workings of the mind—and the sometimes-surprising implications of how those...
Science in the service of power can easily be warped and distorted—but, as this book shows, it can sometimes yield unexpected benefits.
Robert G. Heath (1915-1999) was once a widely respected, influential psychiatrist at Tulane University. As neurobiologist-turned–science journalist Frank (My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time, 2012, etc.) writes, Heath’s biologically oriented work found many acolytes, among them a student who lost his academic chair later in life for having “prescribed too many interesting—and illegal—medications” to the university football team. Some of Heath’s work was equally troubling on the ethical front. He likely worked with the CIA on mind control experiments. Moreover, as Frank’s book opens, we find him attempting “to convert a homosexual man to heterosexual preferences through brain stimulation,” having wired electrodes into the patient’s brain’s “pleasure center” and hired a female prostitute to effect the conversion. Heath’s “brain pacemaker,” as he called the electrode device, was applied to dozens of other patients suffering from schizophrenia and depression, a seemingly brutal application save that other remedies were more invasive electroshock treatments and lobotomies. It turns out, writes the author, that although Heath is forgotten or discredited today, he was on to something: what is called “deep brain stimulation” is at the forefront of psychological studies today, with uses that include treating PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Arriving at this conclusion took decades of work in neuroscience, including the ability to study MRI scans of neural centers, among them “brain regions involved with our motivation, our experience of fear, our learning abilities and memory, libido, regulation of sleep, appetite”—in short, activities of interest to industry and government as well as science. Heath’s work may then have application after all, writes Frank, even if one psychiatric technician allows along the way that “maybe he shouldn’t have done that experiment.”
A thoughtful, always interesting look into the workings of the mind—and the sometimes-surprising implications of how those workings have been revealed.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98653-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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