From opium pipe to orbitofrontal cortex, a smoothly entertaining interplay between lived experience and the particulars of...
Developmental neuroscientist Lewis (Human Development and Applied Psychology/Radboud Univ., Netherlands) examines his odyssey from minor stoner to helpless, full-blown addict.
It all started when he was sent to boarding school in New England, where each student had their own host of problems and despair. But it was when he attended UC-Berkeley that he began to explore the world of drugs beyond the occasional bottle of cough syrup, to smoke marijuana and hash throughout the day and pop psychedelics a few times a week. As he now understands it, the drugs were talking to his brain "in the language of dopamine and peptides, neuromodulators and receptors," tricking the brain into releasing the neurochemicals of reward. As Lewis unspools one pungent drug episode after another, he capably knits into the narrative an accessible explanation of the neural activity that guided his behavior. Lewis chronicles his drug life shuffling from California to Malaysia to Calcutta to Canada, and he provides sharp place portraits intermixed with cringingly prismatic descriptions of intoxication and the bite of boredom, loneliness and shame. “I saw myself as a pathetic creature,” he writes, “a fool, completely obsessed with a stupid drug that I was impervious to the riot of life, the celebration of everyday sensation, that even the poorest people on earth were enjoying all around me." And though it is cheering that Lewis was finally able to shake the monkey off his back, it’s a shame that neuroscience couldn’t give him an answer about why: "I don't actually know the answer. I believe that further research in the neuroscience of addiction will help me get closer to finding it.”
From opium pipe to orbitofrontal cortex, a smoothly entertaining interplay between lived experience and the particulars of brain activity.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61039-147-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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
PERSPECTIVES
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