A unique addition to the realm of popular brain science.
A neuropsychologist’s grief memoir embedded within a series of eclectic musings on consciousness.
Broks (Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology, 2003) lost his wife after a long battle with cancer. The days and months leading up to and away from her death—she chose palliative end-of-life care over aggressive but unpromising chemotherapy—opened newly personal dimensions to the questions of existence he had long been investigating as a researcher. The resulting assemblage follows no recognizable schema: The author invites readers to wander at will through this “ramshackle house of a book,” a loose collage of memories, dreams, brain science, quotations, philosophies of mind, journal entries, and earnest pencil sketches, with the story of his grief and recovery turning up from time to time amid the bric-a-brac. Alongside the brain candy of unusual case histories—e.g., people caught in the nightmarish hallucinations of sleep paralysis or who suddenly stop recognizing their own body parts as belonging to them or who suffer from Cotard’s syndrome, in which they believe they are dead—Broks weaves in entry-level overviews of anatomy, philosophy, myth, and literature, with a predilection for the Greeks and the Stoics. This boldly casual exploration, in which a grieving brain scientist wrestles with his own experience of the mystery of awareness and the perennial problem of mind, is less about epiphany than apophany, the moment when perception goes off the rails into delusion. Some chapters delve into theoretical territory that might leave general readers disturbed or mystified, such as the author’s support for a colleague’s claim that up to 10 percent of people are “philosophical zombies,” engaging in normal-seeming behaviors despite an observable lack of sentience in their brain imaging. In a style sometimes reminiscent of The Last Lecture, Broks blends wonder with pessimistic hope. He adumbrates that there is something unbelievable, perhaps even magical, in the “absurdity” of consciousness and related phenomena, and he thrills to the precarious individuality of our imaginings.
A unique addition to the realm of popular brain science.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-307-98579-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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