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THE GHOST IN MY BRAIN

Name: THE GHOST IN MY BRAIN
Author: Clark Elliott
ISBN: 978-0-525-42656-1

HOW A CONCUSSION STOLE MY LIFE AND HOW THE NEW SCIENCE OF BRAIN PLASTICITY HELPED ME GET IT BACK

by Clark Elliott ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2015

With concussions from sports injuries making the news, Elliott’s easy-to-read account of his experiences is a valuable...

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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

Categories:

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)