The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma

I heard the author interviewed on radio and thought the book sounded interesting. When I got it, I decided it was way over my head. My husband had no interest in it, so we donated it to charity. It may be a great book for someone in this field.

I heard Sam Kean interviewed on PBS and decided to buy this book. Very entertaining. It basically discussed how we, the collective, figured out how the brain works. I only wish I can completely remember what I read. The brain is quite complicated, but all humans are basically wired the same way, with minor exceptions.

Sam Kean is a GREAT story teller, and captivates audiences of all levels. The hardcover is still on it's way to me, but I started the Kindle version as soon as it was released and an though I am only 2-chapters in. I am already completely hooked, and though I had supposed it couldn't possibly be a good as Disappearing Spoon...it already seems to be!

I have read both of the authors' previous books, and very much looked forward to this one! It has already exceeded my expectations. It is great to find books that captivate me like this, and also written in such a way that even my 8-year old finds them fascinating. The Disappearing Spoon book got my son hooked on Chemistry, and he talks about the elements like they are his friends, considering Gadolinium and Mercury his favorites, I attribute this to Kean's great story-telling abilities.

The Violinist Thumb was on a topic I had not considered much about either way previously, but since I had enjoyed his first book so much, I bought it as well, and thoroughly enjoyed as well (as did my son).

This one weaves fascinating tales right from the first lines of the first chapter...Kean's website has an excerpt of this first chapter ([...]).

Many thanks to this great storyteller and favorite author!!

Carl

Having read Kean's other books, I was disappointed in this newest one. It contains some interesting and gruesome stories that were not effectively tied together into a larger picture of the brain and how it works. Oliver Sacks does a better job in his books on the topic.

If you have any interest in neuroscience then there is little new in the Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. If you are new to the field Kean tells the history of neurosurgery through anecdotes. The narrative just never engaged me. The "technical" exposition is well-done and clear but this is a subject more thoroughly and delightfully covered by Oliver Sacks in his many books.

Relying solely on anecdotal case studies, 'The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons' nonetheless presents an elucidating and informative tour through the neural connections of the human brain via the true stories of individuals affected by severe trauma. While it does lack the sophistication that would be more in evidence were it to have been authored by someone with a medical degree, the intent of this book was to make an attempt at exploring the resilience and functionality of localized areas of the human brain, with emphasis placed on how the mind can be affected when the brain is damaged. On that account, there is no question how well 'The Dueling Neurosurgeons' succeeded.

In what is an eminently readable introduction to the intricacies of neural connections and how they relate to our every thought and motion, the subject is approached from the angle that science's most effective means of understanding which sections control what specific functions is to this day best demonstrated by studying the effects of traumatic injuries. This is conveyed splendidly, and, for a medical layman, in a remarkably erudite manner. The information is certainly related in a way that the uninitiated can easily follow, without resorting to softening its intellectual merit.

Not only was it an excellent introduction to such complicated subject matter, I appreciated Mr Kean's inclusion of biographical and intimate details surrounding the men and women involved, so that that the subjects are never dehumanized, but made all the more sympathetic from these before and after glimpses of their lives. As a former psychology major, I found that aspect sorely lacking in the more academic texts - the professionals would do well to take a cue from Mr Kean in that regard.

In offering some captivating evidence that the mind and brain are of course the same, yet entirely separate entities, this book proves its merits many times over. At the very least, it provokes scientific curiosity and was an entertaining form of education - the very best sort. Though the topic could have been a slog in less capable hands, I devoured it with relish in half a day.

As someone who is drawn to history and science writing, I thought this book would be fascinating. Having heard the author interviewed on Science Friday also increased my interest. Instead I found the writing to be clichéd, turgid, and boring.

In this book Kean employs his usual style of informing and entertaining the reader by citing different historical/biographical vignettes. We learn about the assassins of Presidents Garfield and McKinley. Most of us know very little about these killers as their motives and mental disarray have been overshadowed by the biographies of the assassins of Lincoln and Kennedy. We read again about the variety of strange perceptual dysfunctions that can afflict people depending on what parts of their brains have been compromised. The famous Phineas Gage who had a ramrod fly through his head makes an appearance here too. But we learn a little more about his life after the accident than most narratives of neurological trauma get around to including.

This book is perhaps a bit too episodic though. Reading it is a little like wandering through an interactive science museum. You look at this interesting factoid on display – press this button and see what happens. Then you move on to the next display, and then the next. You end up feeling like a pack rat accumulating shiny shards of information that don't really relate to each other in any memorable, consistent way. Going over my notes of this book, I was surprised to see how little of the information had stuck to my bones.

Perhaps that is necessarily the case with any popular overview of a subject. You get teasing, enticing tidbits. Then you can follow up and learn more about any particular topic on your own.

However, there are a few things that are decidedly odd about Kean's collage of inclusions and omissions. For one thing, he only mentions Oliver Sacks once, in a bibliographic citation of a magazine article that Sacks wrote. Sacks was such a pioneer in the field of unusual neurological manifestations, writing with humanity and insight into these problems. For Kean to have written a book about mind/brain function without mentioning Sacks is like writing a book about relativity without mentioning Einstein.

Then, while Kean's usual pages of endnotes are well worth reading, they include a strange outburst against polygraph examiners. It's probably good to be reminded that polygraph tests yield a significant percentage of erroneous results. Still, Kean's vulgar outrage hits the reader like a slap in the face. Where did that come from?

Also, Kean's squibs are often just a repetition of the thumbnail accounts recycled through many books on the subject. These include a lot of assumptions that get passed on unchallenged. For example, Kean says that people such as memory-man Shereshevsky, people "who can't forget anything," suffer as great a tragedy as people who can't remember anything. But it seems that in actuality, Shereshevsky didn't suffer from having a good memory, which wasn't so unusual or so complete after all. It seems the man did have some degree of synesthesia which allowed him to more vividly remember numbers and other random lists because he could associate them with colors and smells. But in the main, his memory was just the result of his using mnemonic devices such as any of us might master. (See Joshua Foer's "Moonwalking with Einstein.")

On the whole though, this is an engaging, enlightening potpourri from an obviously brainy author - someone up front about the frontal lobes and hip to the hippocampus.

Once upon a time, our knowledge of what the brain did, how it worked, and the degree to which its parts were specialized came from observing people who had brain injuries or a disease of the brain. Kean’s book examines the evolution of our understanding of the brain by way of investigations of historic cases. Looking at damaged brains is obvious not the ideal way to study the most complex system in the known universe—accidents and brain-eating diseases aren’t discriminating. Still, over time, a few conscientious [and sometimes warped] doctors and scientists pieced together important clues. From the rudimentary observation that people conked on the head often pass out temporarily, doctors began to learn about the degree to which brain parts were specialized and how changes in the brain effected beliefs, memories, and behavior.

Kean’s book is in part a history and in part a work of popular science, and the cases selected are often of interest both as history and as science. We learn about the damaged brains of kings, assassins, soldiers, adventurers, and those with more mundane jobs but no less fascinating brain trauma (e.g. Phineas Gage, one of the most well-known cases in the book, a construction foreman who had a steel tamping rod rocketed through his skull.)

It’s this historical approach that builds a niche for Kean. There have been a massive number of popular science books on the brain in recent years. (You’ll note that I’ve reviewed many of them.) While other books discuss many of the same intriguing neuroscientific phenomena (e.g. synesthesia [mixing of sense and / or mental data, e.g. people who see colors with musical notes or even with numbers], phantom limbs, epilepsy’s effect on beliefs, and the brain’s role in aberrant behavior) most of them are rooted in the mother lode of discoveries that have come out of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and other modern technologies. Even the works of V.S. Ramachandran, which largely deal in discoveries rooted in low-tech but exceedingly clever science, are placed in the context of present-day science. (You should read Ramachandran’s book “The Tell Tale Brain” also.)

Kean’s book is complementary to the body of works on popular neuroscience. While some of those books mention the same (or similar) cases as Kean, they do so to illustrate the Dark Age origins of many of these questions. Kean delves into the intriguing details of such cases. On the other hand, while Kean is dealing in the historic, he brings in modern science on occasion to give the reader insight into what ideas have been confirmed and which overturned. That’s important as Kean is often telling the reader about the opposing theories of the day—as the title suggests.

The book contains an Introduction and twelve chapters that are arranged into five parts. The book’s organization is by brain structure and key (interesting) functions tied to those various parts. It’s logically arranged, starting with a question as crude as the skull’s role in brain injury and ending on a topic so challenging that there remains a great deal of mystery (and controversy among scientists) about it, i.e. consciousness. In between, we learn about neurotransmitters, neuroplasticity, and the brains role in sensory processing / presentation, bodily awareness / movement, emotion, belief, delusion, and memory—as well as the degree to which the two halves of our brain are independent and what severing the connection does.

The book is end-noted and has a works cited section, but it has a couple other noteworthy features. A fun feature of note is that each chapter begins with a rebus, a kind of word puzzle that relates to an anatomical part relevant to that chapter. There are also graphics in the form of both diagrams and black-and-white photos, and they are interspersed throughout the book with the relevant text (as opposed to in special sections.)

I’d recommend this book for individuals not only interested in neuroscience, but in the history of science generally. Even history buffs who don’t think much about science will likely learn a thing or two from Kean’s presentation of the cases—e.g. there is much discussion of Civil War wounds.

I got “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons” because it combines two of my favorite things—science and history! It was definitely a fun and fascinating read that I’m recommending to friends and family, and I plan to read the author’s other two books (one based on chemistry and one on biology).

A ton of neuroscience history is covered in great detail in this book. A few of the stories/concepts were ones I’d heard of before, but most of it was completely new to me and I still learned new things about the stories/concepts I was already familiar with. The ways in which scientists have studied and come to understand the complexities of the brain is amazing, and it’s amazing how the consequences of brain damage are so wide ranging (and sometimes bizarre) depending on where and what’s damaged.

What made this book extra entertaining and captivating was Kean’s writing. I get the impression that this stuff is interesting and enjoyable to him, and it really comes through in the way he describes and explains things with such care and enthusiasm. A lot of the stories cover serious and grim things, but, where appropriate, his writing turns amusing and made me smile.

Buy a copy or borrow it from the library—you’ll be happy you did! :]

Note: I received an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

If our brains are functioning the right way, we can see straight, we have good recall of memories important and trivial, we can express ourselves, and we can do a thousand other important things. That’s business as usual (and we ought to take some time every day to think about how astonishing that “usual” is). We take well-functioning brains for granted, partially because the billions of neurons silently send out their billions of signals every second and we have no way of accessing what is going on with them even as they make us “us.” It is when things go wrong that we can learn stuff about how brains do their jobs. In fact, before CAT scans and MRIs and EEGs, injured brains that produced particular symptoms were the only way to tell what the mysterious organs were supposed to be doing had they been uninjured. The history of understanding brain injuries and the diverse symptoms that result is the engrossing subject of _The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery_ (Little, Brown) by science writer Sam Kean. It is a fine story of centuries of scientific effort, with case histories of bizarre symptoms that ought to make all of us a little more grateful about all our brains can do.

We accept that brains are where the thoughts and feelings come from, the organ that more than any other gives us our “selves.” This seems intuitive now, but even this basic idea did not come easily. It wasn’t until around the 1600s that, because brain injuries caused particular symptoms of thinking and acting, most informed thinkers credited the brain with being the center of human nature. It was only in the nineteenth century that scientists began to accept that the brain had circumscribed, specialized regions to do specific tasks. The book’s title comes from an important historical case. King Henri II of France in 1559 recklessly took part in a jousting contest and got a lance through his eye, plus he had some sort of brain injury. (French kings were thereafter prohibited from jousting.) Two of the greatest of physicians at the time were called to attend him, Ambroise Paré and Andreas Vesalius. There was little they could do, as the king had seizures and went in and out of consciousness and blindness, and ten days after the accident he was dead. It is quite astonishing that Queen Catherine allowed the surgeons to do an autopsy, as such research was rare at the time. The surgeons noted with amazement that the king’s skull was intact; before this it was thought that if the skull was uninjured, the brain would have to be, too. The king’s brain had been battered within the skull, with a hemorrhage at the rear. Kean explains that this revolutionary understanding that a closed skull does not mean an intact brain is still not fully learned; we are only recently, for instance, asking to what degree concussions are damaging the cranial contents of our high school or professional football players.

There are many strange syndromes here. A girl had a normal childhood, but at age ten the cells in her amygdala died off, making it impossible for her to feel fear. Studies on her, Kean says, “are a hoot to read, since they consist of scientists dreaming up ever-more-elaborate ways to scare her.” Snakes, haunted houses with monsters in costume, and more have all been tried, but nothing frightens her, although she is pretty normal in all other ways. The famous H. M. had surgery to stop his seizures, and they stopped; his personality originally stayed the same, and all was well, except his ability to remember things was gone. He could not remember if he had eaten or not, or follow instructions to get to the bathroom a second time. He could mow the lawn for his parents; it was obvious to him what part of the lawn had been cut and what remained, but his parents had to tell him every time where they kept the mower. On the other hand, Solomon Shereshevsky could not forget anything, with his mind full of unedited impressions that left him confused and helpless to get on in the world. Toxins and blows to the head can cause Capgras Syndrome, whose sufferers are sure that everyone they know has been replaced by a sinister double. One made a confession of bigamy to his priest, since he had married his wife originally and now was married to her replacement who looked and acted just like the original, but wasn’t. A man with normal sexual urges became a pedophile once a brain tumor pressed just so; surgical removal of the tumor reversed the pedophilia.

All of these cases make a reader wonder, “Who is in charge here?” If a little bleeding or an intruding tumor can make such changes, where is the real person? From neurons through neural tracts through brain specialization centers and all the way through to the process of consciousness (that “defining problem of neuroscience”), Kean’s storytelling is masterful and his explanations graceful. The best part is that we have barely started. We have only been doing neuroscience for a few centuries, and there are still so many mysteries left within the three pound mass we all carry in our crania.

Although researchers have extensively charted the human brain, this intricate organ has yet to reveal all of its secrets. Scientists continue to analyze how the myriad parts of the brain communicate with one another and with other parts of the body. In addition, experts are slowly unlocking the secrets of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other devastating diseases.

In "The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons," Sam Kean provides an informative but frightening primer on the history of neuroscience. In this intriguing work, Kean teaches us about the brain's anatomy; outlines how different types of brain damage may affect a person's ability to function mentally, physically, and psychologically; and recounts anecdotes about inept doctors who recklessly experimented on patients who died or were left severely impaired. Fortunately, over the years, others gleaned new and valuable information that helped bring neuroscience out of the dark ages.

Kean's chatty writing style makes his technical subject matter accessible to the intelligent layman. Be warned that many of his true stories are rather gruesome. On the plus side, he touches on such thought-provoking themes as: Why can certain amputees feel pain in phantom limbs? What causes someone to forget the faces of his friends and family? Is there an indefinable essence that makes each of us unique? Remarkably, some patients manage to rebound from seemingly overwhelming traumas to the brain, while others are doomed to live horribly diminished lives.

"The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeon" teaches us that tampering with the brain--a magnificent structure whose complexity cannot be overestimated--is never without elements of risk. This is a well-researched, absorbing, and edifying work of non-fiction that solidifies Kean's reputation as a talented writer whose books are consistently entertaining.

Most minds retain more information when it is presented in a narrative form, the brain seems to like story telling. This is a book that is sure to draw the lay person into an interest in brain science. The author traces the beginnings of the medical field of Neurology, by telling the background stories of the weird, kooky, bizarre and amazing people who were drawn to neurosurgery and the theories of how the brain functions.
These medical practitioners were enticed to think and ponder matters relating to the brain and brain function often by their proximity and involvement with patients who had grievous head trauma or psychological problems.
The stories are entertaining and interesting, so the reader just absorbs the information an intro textbook would cover in a dry and uninteresting way. Kudos to the author for creating a book that is sure to draw readers into further interest in brain science and Neurology.
If your interest gets peaked, go online to ONE and the Charlie Rose series on the brain, where some of the top researchers and medical people discuss some of the latest information on brain science research, which is designed for a curious lay audience.
We live in an age where we have more people suffering from mental disorders, brain disease like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and where medical advancements keep alive people with brain trauma, that wouldn't have been survivable in earlier times...yet our knowledge of brain function has barely scratched the surface of what is knowable. Given all of us will have someone we know or love having to deal with diminished brain function, our only chance of having faster advancements in brain science is to have the general public become more engaged, and to encourage young people with good minds to enter one of the many fields of brain medicine or research.
This is a perfect book to engage a teen who has an interest in science or medicine.

Sam Kean has previously shown his talent for making “science” accessible, interesting and entertaining. Here he takes on neurology in an enjoyable and informative read.

He is not specialist in the field, but knows the subject and knows how to explain it. He takes us through numerous cases of injury and disease– told from the human point of view, not a “litany of one damned brain-scan study after another”. Historically it is through the abnormal and unusual that the workings of the normal mind have been revealed. Some of the cases have appeared elsewhere in books and on documentaries, and, of course Youtube.

They are all fascinating and well told. Just occasionally he seems to offer the bizarre, and the unfortunate, for our amusement, but on the whole a compassion and humanity underlies his writing. His last words express an empathy for sufferings which could afflict any of us.

The author’s style is easy going, even street. “Lutheran scum” was one memorable expression. His description of an aphasic as a “real prick” is another. Just occasionally he borders on flippancy.

He takes a “great men” approach to the history of ideas – after a fashion. The book is as much about the doctors as their patients. And as much about the doctors’ lives outside the clinics and wards. Flaws and weaknesses [and indeed sins] are not concealed. They are written up as characters, as eccentrics – “a pair of bearded Germans”, “a brusque cockney” [nobel laureates all] – and sometimes worse. Sometimes he goes off on too much of a tangent. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like serious science at all; advances seem to occur by chance, accident and unethical experiments on cats and dogs. Of course, the author has his tongue in his cheek, or at least I think so, and he takes us on a tour of the human dimension.

It’s not for the complete beginner, not “for dummies”. The reader would definitely have to have start with some knowledge of the subject. I actually got lost in the closing chapters on consciousness, “the ultimate goal of neuroscience”.

But taken as a whole – with a website offering more - Duelling excited my grey matter, tickled my limbic system and left something in my hippocampus - well I'll know if that's true next Christmas.

Sam Kean unfolds the blossoming of our knowledge of the human brain. He does this in a fascinating sequence of biographical sketches of those individuals who were obsessed with discovering what the bundle of gray matter actually did. Many of these practitioners were quite unwholesome by today's standards and this was true right up to the 20th century. Their first accomplishment was establishing that the mind did reside in the brain. Eventually they determined that the brain was not a single operating system but a group of individual functioning units that communicated through neurons that used electro-chemical impulses and chemical neurotransmitters. To a very large extent the research that provided the insights into brain functioning was discovered through the unfortunate mishaps that befell individuals who because of their disease or injury behaved very differently then they did before the onset of the trauma.
Kean writes with a delightful ease that carries the book along at pleasing pace. There is no prior scientific knowledge needed to comprehend the contents. My only misgivings involve the author's insistence in keeping personal identity as the critical feature of our existence. For me, the emerging truth concerning the brain is that the "I" in individual is an illusion.

Really the history of the study of the brain, the two neurosurgeons of the title appear relatively briefly at the beginning of the book. This is only right, because they were the first neurosurgeons and lived well over 150 years ago. A lot has happened since then, and this book covers every key moment of it, mostly in terms a non-scientist can understand, and with considerable good humor. There's a lot of good historical background, and the stories of many truly bizzare brain ailments, accidents involving the brain, and just plain oddities. Cases of truly odd behavior are covered in excruciating detail. When you finish this book, you will feel, well, brainier.

This is definitely meant for people who want the nitty-gritty of the medical field, therefore it's not for the faint of heart. Buyer beware on that detail!
I, however, loved it. It may have made me cringe at times, but I expect it from books that discuss anything medical like this. It has a lot of uncomfortable truths about how little control one can have over their own body from brain damage (from sexual to violent outbursts), but Sam Kean always explains why these patients acted a certain way by describing in detail which parts of the brain were affected by an accident or disease. I learned that the right and left brain can function amazingly well when separated, but our conscious mind doesn't quite realize that without the help of another person. Our brain relies heavily on our sight, yet even when seeing there is no left arm or right leg, it still sends signals to it as if it were there, causing phantom limbs. On the same note, using a mirror box and some therapy, you can trick the brain into thinking you really do have two arms or legs again, which in may be able to remove the phantom limb altogether. And yet still people who can't see wind up preferring the lack of sight since their other senses have helped them really see the world in a way that is more "colorful" (for lack of a better term).

In addition to describing which parts of the brain do what and using real life people as supporting details, he gives a fair amount of information on the scientists and doctors who made a lot of these discoveries. Sam Kean does well to keep both the bad side of some of these scientists / doctors as well as the good side. I feel this kept the readers down-to-earth by showing just because certain people made amazing discoveries doesn't mean they themselves were amazing. I did however, enjoy that he kept in funny details about how one such scientist had never put a tie on before, and needed his son to do it for him in order to look nice in accepting a Nobel Prize. It humanizes them and puts them on the same level as all other people: just because they have a Nobel Prize doesn't mean they are any better than us.

In short, the book flows well and gives a lot of detail about how we found out what parts of the brain actually do, those that discovered them, and how head injuries can look similar but have drastically different effects on different people. He also has tons of footnotes to reference in the back of the book that recommend more books to read, and articles as well. Sam Kean does well in showing just how insane our brains are, for better or worse, and also shows just how long we have to go to fully understand the brain.

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons was quite an entertaining book. It’s a history of how Neuroscience came to be what it is today. From jousting to dead friars healing the sick, the adventures in this book are humorous, amazing, and at times downright disgusting. A word to of advice when the author says a passage is not for people with sensitive stomachs please believe him. The brain is an amazing organ, full of wonders and mysteries. Many of the maladies discussed in this book have been featured in science fiction novels and movies. This isn't mentioned in the book, a reference to cinema, but I related it to films and books I have read. Kean not only mentions the maladies, he covers how what causes them was discovered as well as what has been done to treat them. Making this book, not only an interesting history book, but a wealth of information for fiction authors. Everything from phantom limbs to believing an ‘imposter’ has replaced everyone you know is covered. The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons is a well-written history of neurosurgery, which is neither boring, nor difficult for a layperson to understand. If the brain and it’s inner workings interested you, you should read this book.

This guy cannot write an uninteresting sentence, let alone an uncompelling book. The Tale is yet another first-rate entry in Kean's growing popular science oeuvre. This is a story that's been told before, but nowhere with greater flare. And Kean takes a novel approach to telling it: not by focusing exclusively on the science of the mind/brain, but by focusing on the stories of many persons -- physicians, psychologists, patients, neuro-scientists -- whose work and/or life contributed significantly to our evolving understanding of human cognition. It's a fantastic way to make highly complex science intelligible to the lay reader, and to humanize what can at times be highly abstract theorizing. I loved this book!

Excellent book. This book reviews the complete history of neuroscience in an instructive yet entertaining way. Each area of neuroscience is explained with vivid case histories. Included is the simple anatomy and working of the brain, brain disease and neurological damage and their clinical manifestations. There are interesting neurological puzzles at the beginning of each chapter.
I recommend this book to anyone who likes reading nonfiction science which almost reads like fiction.
Just a few of the many things I learned in this book are: how vision works; why remembering too much can be as bad or worse than a poor memory; review of distinction between Broca's area and Wernicke's area; what exactly happens to the brain when someone contracts rabies; a full review of the hippocampus with the usual case history of HM and other lesser know exampIes; some of the latest thoughts on consciousness. I do think that a background in biology is helpful, and perhaps makes the book even more interesting, however, it is not absolutely required and anyone can understand and enjoy this book

Sam Kean has an exceptional ability to relate science history and scientific concepts in an engaging, illuminating, and often amusing manner. His books require no previous scientific knowledge, but are so well researched that even science nerds like me will find them rewarding. This book delves into the landmark discoveries in neuroscience that have helped reveal the workings of the brain, and that also show how far we still have to go to understand how the brain makes us who we are. I thoroughly enjoyed the book; so much so that I not only read every endnote, but also went online to read additional notes (there's a web address at the end of the book). The endnotes were as enjoyable as the book, and I can't stress enough that everyone who reads the book should also read the endnotes.

Note: Kean discusses the remarkable life of James Holman and mentions the book about him by Jason Roberts, "A Sense of the World." I highly recommend this book. Holman is a fascinating character who toured the world alone in the 1800s while being blind. His story is simply amazing.

Dueling neurosurgeons, schizophrenic assassins, LSD, and art all play a role in how neuroscience got its start. Kean ties these seemingly disconnected dots together to give readers an engaging and fascinating read. Those familiar with Kean’s writing won’t be disappointed in his newest nonfiction read, while new readers will want to flock to his earlier books. -Natasha Vasillis, Bloggers Recommend

A very well researched and almost what I never thought I would ever say about a book on neurosurgery and the brain - an entertaining book. If you think this book would be dry. It is not. The author uses a vast amount of anecdotal information on the stories of both famous and obscure brain injured people and the doctors who treated them from the seventeen hundreds to the present day to great advantage. If you have any curiosity about the the wonders of the human brain - read this book.