The Man with the Electrified Brain: Adventures in Madness

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The Man with the Electrified Brain: Adventures in Madness

â€œA GRIPPING DESCRIPTION OF A JOURNEY TO HELL AND BACK, ONE THAT WILL TAKE ITS PLACE BESIDE WILLIAM STYRONâ€™S â€˜DARKNESS VISIBLEâ€™ AND KAY REDFIELD JAMISONâ€™S â€˜AN UNQUIET MIND.â€™â€ â€”OLIVER SACKS

â€œI glanced at myself in a mirror and, though unshaven, and my hair still morning-tousled, I appeared to be just the same. It was inside, inside my head, where all had become so wretchedly different. I had the night before been incontrovertibly a man of stable mood, of calm, of good cheer and unforced bonhomie. Now I had become changed, with dreadful suddenness, into another being altogether.â€

Simon Winchester has never shied away from big, even enormous, topicsâ€”as evidenced by his bestselling biography of the Atlantic Ocean, his account of the Krakatoa volcanic eruption, and his wildly popular â€œThe Professor and the Madman,â€ about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. In his Byliner Original â€œThe Man with the Electrified Brain,â€ he takes on arguably his most daunting subject yet: his own flirtation with madness, and one of natureâ€™s greatest and most enduring mysteries, the human brain.

As a geology student in his second year at Oxford, Winchester was known as a young man of even temper and keen intellect, until one June morning when he woke to find himself â€œchanged with dreadful suddenness into another being altogether,â€ his normal life â€œslumped into chasmâ€ and â€œfolded in the dirt.â€ For a period of nine days, he lived in immobilizing fear. Everyday itemsâ€”familiar paintings, a pile of books, his own robe hanging from a hookâ€”became objects of horror; the world lost color, purpose, all sense and safety. When the episode finally passed, he returned to normal, presuming that what had happened to him was a fluke. It wasnâ€™t. The episode repeated itself at unpredictable and dangerous intervals for four yearsâ€”always lasting for nine daysâ€”and very nearly caused the authorâ€™s death while he was on an expedition in the Arctic.

What was wrong with him? Where could he find help? Would he spend the rest of his life anticipating the return of these mental blackouts? With the urgency of a whodunit, Winchester describes the coming and going of these terrifying dissociative states and the chance encounter that led to the controversial treatment of electroconvulsive therapy, which may or may not have cured him once and for all.

Written by a consummate storyteller, â€œThe Man with the Electrified Brainâ€ locates that finest of lines between sanity and insanity and is Winchesterâ€™s most riveting and deeply personal work yet.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Simon Winchester, a former foreign correspondent for â€œThe Guardianâ€ and the London â€œSunday Times,â€ has written twenty-five books of nonfiction, many of which have been international bestsellers, among them â€œThe Professor and the Madman,â€ â€œKrakatoa,â€ â€œThe Map that Changed the World,â€ â€œThe Man Who Loved China,â€ and â€œAtlantic.â€ â€œThe Men Who United the Statesâ€ is to be published in October. Simon Winchester was sworn in as an American citizen on the afterdeck of the USS Constitution on Independence Day 2011, though he retains the OBE awarded him by HM the Queen â€œfor services to literatureâ€ in 2006. He lives in the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts.

PRAISE FOR â€œTHE MAN WITH THE ELECTRIFIED BRAINâ€

â€œA graceful, moving, and insightful account of a devastating condition which lies at the edge of our understanding of mental life.â€ â€”Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of â€œHow the Mind Worksâ€

Country	USA
Author	Simon Winchester
Binding	Kindle Edition
EISBN	9781614520832
Format	Kindle eBook
IsAdultProduct
Label	Byliner Inc.
Manufacturer	Byliner Inc.
NumberOfPages	45
PublicationDate	2013-08-06
Publisher	Byliner Inc.
ReleaseDate	2013-08-06
Studio	Byliner Inc.

The Man with the Electrified Brain: Adventures in Madness

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