A rich, fascinating portrait of extraordinary sensory awareness.
A Boston neurologist reflects on his remarkable ability to experience the same physical sensations as those found in his patients.
Harvard-trained clinical researcher Salinas explains his experiences as a polysynesthete and how this uncanny sensory-overlapping capability continues to affect his patient care practice. This kind of extrasensory awareness is most commonly found in artists, the author writes, and encompasses many different incarnations, such as grapheme-color, ordinal linguistic personification, and mirror-touch synesthesia. “I can perceive motion as sound, music as color, taste as shape as well as a wide variety of other exotic manifestations,” he writes. Salinas notes that he can also detect sensations even when not facing a living person—e.g., muscle tension in his neck or arm strain when looking at the statue of David or Lady Liberty. His book, however, focuses mainly on how the “living labor” of this neurologic phenomenon both directly enhances and personally distracts him in his personal life and medical practice. Salinas nimbly retraces his history back to a Miami childhood in which vivid colors appeared on random images, like “memories of color, firework trails in the tight spaces between the solid lines,” and even things like getting dressed for school became a tactile challenge. Intensive research on synesthesia, connections with others like him, and the eventual acceptance of his abilities opened the door for romantic relationships and an unparalleled and riveting learning experience throughout medical school, even though he continued to physically feel the pain of his patients. Following a chronicle of his challenging psychiatry residency in Massachusetts, Salinas presents remarkable medical cases that reflect the humanity and sensitivity his condition engenders, particularly through ordeals with an autistic child and a stroke victim. Vicarious and enthralling, Salinas’ memoir draws on a trove of intimate personal (both triumphant and heartbreaking) memories and thoughtful patient care experiences to effectively explain his life as a complex, sense-heightened man.
A rich, fascinating portrait of extraordinary sensory awareness.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-245866-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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