A mind-bending and inspiring book.
The fascinating story of how a chiropractor, after suffering a massive brain injury, became an acclaimed artist with an entirely new outlook on life.
When Jon Sarkin awoke from brain surgery that required the removal of part of his cerebellum, he knew something fundamental about his sense of self had changed. The cerebellum controls motor coordination, processes visual images and affects cognition, emotion and behavior, and while Sarkin ultimately made a remarkable physical recovery, he no longer felt the same way about life. Before, he'd been a pragmatic family man, dedicated to his practice; after, he felt disassociated with those instincts, and instead experienced a “ferocious need to create” and began to draw compulsively. Newark Star-Ledger veteran reporter Nutt incisively delves into the emotional and physical implications of such a shift, examining the relationship between the brain and the soul. For thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have investigated this relationship, pondering the physical location of self-identity (curiously, the brain was generally considered superfluous to the soul, and other organs were linked to emotion and intellect). Only relatively recently have researchers concluded that physical brain matter contains the force of life; neurosurgeons can even identify parts of the brain containing specific memories and impulses. When Sarkin lost part of his cerebellum, he also lost part of his ability to identify who he was. “If our ability to sense the world is compromised,” writes Nutt, “so is our sense of self.” Sarkin's damaged brain, as it repaired neurons over time, enhanced certain impulses and sensations to make up for what was lost, leaving him with a heightened sense of color and space. Art became the medium in which he searched for his new self, and he filled in the gaps in his self-identity with pictures. He is now a well-known artist and writer, and has said that “[w]hen an artist is truly born, that is the end of the person that was a person before he was an artist.”
A mind-bending and inspiring book.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-4310-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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