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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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