With concussions from sports injuries making the news, Elliott’s easy-to-read account of his experiences is a valuable...
Up-close view of living with the harrowing effects of a concussion by a professor of artificial intelligence who kept thorough notes of the experience and shares what he learned about overcoming his severe disabilities.
When Elliott (DePaul Univ.) was concussed in a traffic accident, he soon discovered that the medical community, including neurologists, was ill-prepared to either recognize or treat the injury to his brain. Here, the author documents his medical encounters and what it was like living for years with a badly damaged brain—he had difficulties with balance, body sense, muscle control, memory, walking, hearing, seeing, eating, sleeping, his sense of time, and making decisions, plus seizures, nausea, and pain. He felt, he writes, like an alien living among humans. As he notes, the suicide rate among concussion sufferers is high. The previously high-functioning Elliott not only reveals his own brain’s limitations after the accident; he also examines the workings of a normal, healthy brain. Years after the injury, he learned of the work of Donalee Markus, a cognitive restructuring specialist working in the Chicago area. Markus used paper-and-pencil, context-free visual puzzles to help Elliott regain his cognitive functioning skills, and she referred him to Deborah Zelinsky, an optometrist who used a progression of nontraditional therapeutic eyeglasses to alter the way the brain conveys visual/spatial signals to the visual cortex. As the author explains, both approaches utilize the amazing plasticity of the human brain. Details of their approaches constitute the book’s final portion, and both women have provided informative forewords describing their work. Happily, under their programs, the author made large strides toward normalcy.
With concussions from sports injuries making the news, Elliott’s easy-to-read account of his experiences is a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the condition.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42656-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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