An exquisite insider’s look into the mysteries of consciousness.
When Padgett suffered a traumatic brain injury after a violent mugging, his sense of perception was profoundly altered. Overnight, his life as a fun-loving salesman changed into one dominated by unprompted geometric visualizations and the unexpected insights of newfound mathematical brilliance.
The effect of the author’s injury was as complex as it was sudden. In addition to seeing crystalline and fractal patterns as part of the properties of objects and spaces around him, he developed a paralyzing fear of being among people and germs. Further debilitated by a series of personal losses, Padgett spent years in isolation, spending all his time investigating the concepts that suddenly held his mind hostage: math and science but also medical theories that might explain his neurological transformation. Based on his research, he suspected he had developed a form of synesthesia—a condition in which sensations are perceived in unusual ways, such as seeing letters or numbers as inseparable from specific colors—as a result of his injury. He was right. Padgett was officially diagnosed as having acquired savant syndrome and mathematical synesthesia, making him the only person with this diagnosis in the world. Throughout his transformation and recovery, the author compulsively drew pictures of the shapes that materialized and refracted before his eyes. These drawings, stunning in their complexity and also important to the author as a therapeutic method, have since been recognized internationally. Also important is that advanced technologies have provided images of his brain in unprecedented detail, resulting in a broader understanding of synesthesia as it affects the brain’s chemistry. To put his remarkable story in writing, he partnered with Seaberg, a fellow synesthete who writes about synesthesia for Psychology Today. The result is a beautiful, inspiring and intimate account of Padgett's struggles and breakthroughs.
An exquisite insider’s look into the mysteries of consciousness.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-04560-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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