Zasetsky is the soldier whose journals form the subjective core of this book. In 1943, aged 23, he received a bullet wound in the left temporo-parieto-occipital area of the brain, leaving him severely aphasic. During his rehabilitation and over the next 30 years, he struggled to express what was happening to him, word by word, and to describe the difficulties he faced, in 3,000 pages of journals. For 25 years he was lucky to be cared for by the great Russian psychologist, Professor AR Luria, known among other things for a textbook on Traumatic Aphasia, using the results of … Read more...
Tag: experience
Naoki Higashida – Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight
The Reason I Jump was the book of a 13 year old, but Naoki Higashida’s new book, Fall Down Seven Times Get Up Eight is that of an accomplished writer, written when the author was in his late teens and early 20s. What makes the accomplished writing in this book all the more remarkable is that the author has a severe sensori-motor processing and communication impairment, requiring a QWERTY pointerboard to painstakingly spell out the Japanese letters for his words. It is hard to imagine from the skillful poems and reflective pieces in this book that the author finds it … Read more...
Kay Redfield Jamison – An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir Of Moods And Madness
Kay Redfield Jamison is a world expert on Manic-Depression, as a Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. But her academic and clinical expertise is fundamentally underpinned by her personal experience of the condition. Indeed, she tells how her text-book on Manic-Depressive Illness, co-authored with Dr Frederick Goodwin, uses her personal writing and that of other people with the condition to describe the clinical features – “Many of the descriptions were from writers and artists who had given highly articulate and vivid descriptions of their manias, depressions, and mixed states.”
But An Unquiet Mind is … Read more...
Robert McCrum – Every Third Thought
Falls are common among the elderly, but rare are well-written accounts describing the shock and loss of confidence that result, and still rarer those that articulate the intimations of mortality that follow afterwards. Robert McCrum wrote a moving memoir about his stroke when he was 42, My Year Off, and he has now followed that in his early 60s with a searching, challenging, and ultimately moving discussion about his own intimations of mortality.
The fall that sparks this discussion is described in chapter 2, and in the following chapters there are useful descriptions of the way our culture worships … Read more...
Barbara Arrowsmith-Young – The Woman Who Changed Her Brain
It is unusual to find a description of what it feels like to have a cognitive impairment. Unsurprisingly, published narratives are the products of our world’s wordsmiths, but there are few published narratives by those who find it difficult to understand relationships between words. For the first 25 years of her life Barbara Arrowsmith-Young had severe difficulties in processing symbols and meanings, a semantic aphasia which caused extreme frustration with many aspects of learning, despite her phenomenal memory. Although this book is mostly about what she does in her school to help children and adults remedy their cognitive deficits, the … Read more...
Naoki Higashida – The Reason I Jump
Naoki’s books are mind-boggling. David Mitchell refers to the books by people with autism as ‘autism-witness texts’, and all of Naoki’s books come into that category. However, Naoki’s first book, The Reason I Jump, is exceptional in that it was written when he was 13, even as he was working on his verbal skills and trying to develop communication. As he writes to the ‘neurotypical’ reader, “have a nice trip through our world”. Each sentence was transmitted via his alphabet board, on which Naoki points to the letters that spell out Japanese hiragana characters. This is a laborious process, … Read more...