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MEMORY'S GHOST

Name: MEMORY'S GHOST
Author: Philip J. Hilts
ISBN: 0-684-80356-9

THE STRANGE TALE OF MR. M AND THE NATURE OF MEMORY

by Philip J. Hilts ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1995

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The mysteries of human memory are deftly probed by Hilts, New York Times Washington correspondent on science and health policy (Scientific Temperaments, 1982, etc.). Hilts delves into the case of Henry M., who was left without a memory when drastic experimental brain surgery to relieve his epilepsy failed. Some 40 years after Henry's disastrous encounter with the surgeon's knife, researchers are still learning from his tragedy how the brain creates memories. Hilts came to know the gentle Henry as well as anyone can know a creature who lives only in the present moment. It's a fascinating account, made more so by Hilts's knack for finding concrete images, e.g., ``What . . . is now missing for Henry is the engine of memory which we use to catch the events of the world as they go by.'' Although Hilts notes that describing the mind's mysteries has been largely left to scientists who cannot express well what they know and to poets who can express well but know little, his own writing achieves a gracious balance between science and literature. He shares painful personal memories, and he seeks out articulate scientists to help him explain the biology and chemistry of memory. In addition, Hilts traces a kind of history of memoryfrom its precursors in the responses of simple animals to marks made on bone by early humans to Homer's catalogs of ships and warriors to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. His conclusion, that memorythe central trait of the human mindis an act of construction, not of recording, and that memory's chief feature is its malleability, will afford little comfort to recovered memory therapists. Fans of Oliver Sacks will find much to savor here.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-684-80356-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)