Synopses & Reviews
When celebrated neuropsychologist Paul Broks's wife died of cancer, it sparked a journey of grief and reflection that traced a lifelong attempt to understand how the brain gives rise to the soul. The result of that journey is a gorgeous, evocative meditation on fate, death, consciousness, and what it means to be human.
The Darker the Night, The Brighter the Stars weaves a scientist’s understanding of the mind — its logic, its nuance, how we think about what makes a person — with a poet’s approach to humanity, that crucial and ever-elusive why. It’s a story that unfolds through the centuries, along the path of humankind’s constant quest to discover what makes us human, and the answers that consistently slip out of our grasp. It’s modern medicine and psychology and ancient tales; history and myth combined; fiction and the stranger truth.
But, most importantly, it’s Broks’s story, grounded in his own most fascinating cases as a clinician — patients with brain injuries that revealed something fundamental about the link between the raw stuff of our bodies and brains and the ineffable selves we take for who we are. Tracing a loose arc of loss, acceptance, and renewal, he unfolds striking, imaginative stories of everything from Schopenhauer to the Greek philosophers to jazz guitarist Pat Martino in order to sketch a multifaceted view of humanness that is as heartbreaking at it is affirming.
Review
“More than a compilation of case studies, Broks’s book is a digressive journey through the subject of human consciousness….Like the box of old family photographs Broks achingly describes, this metascience narrative is well worth sorting through.” Publishers Weekly
Review
“In a style sometimes reminiscent of The Last Lecture, Broks blends wonder with pessimistic hope. He adumbrates that there is something unbelievable, perhaps even magical, in the 'absurdity' of consciousness and related phenomena, and he thrills to the precarious individuality of our imaginings. [The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars is] a unique addition to the realm of popular brain science.” Kirkus Reviews
Review
“The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars is a work of extraordinary insight and imagination. Broks is a 21st-century Dante of the human psyche, guiding us on a journey full of surprise, erudition, and wit.” David George Haskell, author of The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees
Review
"In this gorgeous kaleidoscope of a book, the neuroscientist Paul Broks takes us image by image, story by story, into an exploration of life with all its brilliant hues of grief and despair, joy and resilience, biology and society. There's science here, and curiosity, and humanity, all forming a remarkable portrait of who we are — and who we hope to be." Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook
Review
“Broks weaves many threads — memoir, neuroscience, and metaphysics — into a rich fabric of reflection, speculation and deep feeling. This is a work that defies categorization, fusing nonfiction and imagination into a single instrument of piercing insight and emotional honesty.” Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
About the Author
Paul Broks is an English neuropsychologist and science writer. He is a former Prospect columnist, and his work has been featured in The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, and Granta. Trained as a clinical psychologist at Oxford University, Broks is a specialist in clinical neuropsychology and is the author of Into the Silent Land, which was shortlisted for The Guardian's First Book Award.
Paul Broks on PowellsBooks.Blog
In her dying days, my wife said to me, matter-of-factly,
You don’t know how precious life is. You think you do, but you don’t. We were sitting out on the patio in the late summer sunshine, drinking tea. A week later, I was sitting there alone, but her words were with me. They still are...
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