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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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