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REACHING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Name: REACHING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
Author: Allan H. Ropper
ISBN: 978-1-250-03498-4

A RENOWNED NEUROLOGIST EXPLAINS THE MYSTERY AND DRAMA OF BRAIN DISEASE

by Allan H. Ropper ; Brian David Burrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2014

Compassionate, useful reading related by an expert in his field.

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A renowned neurologist examines some important questions: “[W]hat does it mean to be the patient faced with these seismic problems, and how is a connection made with the physician who embodies the knowledge that can make it better?”

Harvard Medical School professor and Brigham and Women’s Hospital master clinician Ropper and writer Burrell make an intellectual, sympathetic team: One brings the meat and potatoes to the table, the other, a measure of distance. They exhibit both a hungry curiosity and an elegant writing style married to the humbleness that comes from standing at the edge of the rabbit hole. The meat and potatoes are the individual cases that have crossed Ropper’s path and that the authors have framed into stories. These neurological tales shimmer and flash, a wily combination of Oliver Sacks and Berton Roueché, “through the painstaking examination of the patient. Every gesture, every movement, every inflection of speech, every reflex, all these point to the precise location of the problem in the nervous system.” Though a neurologist has to be well-acquainted with the design and function of the nervous system and use the latest technology, it’s also vitally important to “[s]tick with the patient’s story and the bedside exam.” Ropper’s patients range all over the place, from heroic to discomfiting to scary, and his predilection to neurological arcana makes for gripping material—as one patient recalled, “When they started…the hallucinations, what I saw first was Queen Elizabeth and her corgis in my fireplace…I also had Dick Tracy come by. He had a yellow overcoat. It was Warren Beatty.” The author explores a wide variety of conditions, including the exterior degeneration of ALS and the often befuddling symptoms of advanced brain trauma, but he rarely falls into jargon and always keeps the narrative lively and engaging.

Compassionate, useful reading related by an expert in his field.

Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-250-03498-4

Page Count: 272

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)