Scan barcode
polly_beats's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
hearingtrumpet's review against another edition
4.0
Sometimes overwhelming with termini, but all and all entertaining and enlightening read about the mysteries of our mind through the personal experiences of a remarkable writer.
bienchen18's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
3.25
lyterially's review against another edition
4.0
Really informative and good structure. I can follow up easily and not being confused with all the medicate term, especially with all the examples that are quite imaginative to understand. And because of this book I figured out myself having some signs that I did not know it has a name before.
uvejota's review against another edition
4.0
Una gran reflexión sobre el yo, sobre la mente y el cuerpo. Sobre el dolor y el miedo, la ausencia. Un gran gran libro.
teresatumminello's review against another edition
4.0
This book is the result of a talk Hustvedt was asked to give as part of a series on Narrative Medicine. It's not a memoir, though its touchpoint is a personal experience of the author, but reads as an extended essay. As with the best of essays, its interest originates from the particular of the personal, then opens up into the general, the universal. Its focus is on the mind-brain conundrum, reaching back into its history and changing cultural meanings, as far back as Wittgenstein and even further back for examples, then leads back to a present that doesn't seem all that different as to how much is known. Fittingly for a novelist, her sympathies are with the individual and individual stories.
Fifteen years ago, I, like many others, experienced lower back pain. The pain shot down into my leg and kept me awake at night. After trying 'everything', I read [b:Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection|144873|Healing Back Pain The Mind-Body Connection|John E. Sarno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344266014l/144873._SY75_.jpg|2291234] and recognized that my stress had gone to my back: the pain disappeared. Some time later, I started having headaches that I thought were migraines and they were treated as such, though 'nothing' seemed to work on them. During internet research, I read a description of tension headaches and realized those were what I was experiencing, not migraines: I haven't had one since. Labels-- diagnoses -- are powerful.
Because her approach is interdisciplinary, this is not the only topic she touches. She speaks of memory, dreams, imagination, synesthesia, hallucinations, subjectivity, and the nature of the self. This might seem too much for such a short book, but each subject flows naturally into the next.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go do my yoga stretches and weights for my neck pain, which at least has a story behind it...
Fifteen years ago, I, like many others, experienced lower back pain. The pain shot down into my leg and kept me awake at night. After trying 'everything', I read [b:Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection|144873|Healing Back Pain The Mind-Body Connection|John E. Sarno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344266014l/144873._SY75_.jpg|2291234] and recognized that my stress had gone to my back: the pain disappeared. Some time later, I started having headaches that I thought were migraines and they were treated as such, though 'nothing' seemed to work on them. During internet research, I read a description of tension headaches and realized those were what I was experiencing, not migraines: I haven't had one since. Labels-- diagnoses -- are powerful.
Because her approach is interdisciplinary, this is not the only topic she touches. She speaks of memory, dreams, imagination, synesthesia, hallucinations, subjectivity, and the nature of the self. This might seem too much for such a short book, but each subject flows naturally into the next.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go do my yoga stretches and weights for my neck pain, which at least has a story behind it...
marc129's review against another edition
4.0
A magnificent book, I cannot formulate it in any other way. Mind you, this is not a novel, rather a drawn out essay with an autobiographical focus. After all, Hustvedt describes how, from 2006 onwards, she regularly suffers from sudden, severe tremors, and in the book she looks back on her years of searching for an explanation and a solution to it.
So this is a very specialized, rather difficult book to read. Hustvedt tells about her wanderings along psychologists, neurologists, brain specialists, and about her own in-depth study of the state of affairs in those domains, also illustrated with concrete cases she knows herself or she has heard about or read about. She does this in a rather chaotic, meandering way, which according to the reviews enervate many readers. But for me this just was the charm of this book: anyone who is confronted with major illnesses or disorders cannot but work in this way: searching, wandering, asking questions, trying treatmenst, going from success to disappointment and back.
This book provides a staggering picture of a science that knows only a fraction of how man works in that gray zone between neurology, psychology and brain; a science that constantly contradicts itself and swings from one trend or fashion to another, and nevertheless keeps on launching new theories with a air of certainty, or secretly returns to previously stubbornly opposed visions.
Even Hustvedt herself did not get much further despite all her attempts and perseverence. And I see this too is a source of frustration for many readers. But then they have just missed the point of this book, I would say. Because Hustvedt eventually draws the only possible, pragmatic conclusion: she accepts that her persistent migraine and the tremor-attacks for whatever reason are part of her own identity: "that trembling woman, that's me".
Ultimately, this book for Hustvedt, with all its hesitations and confusion, is not just a plea for acceptance (and fatalism), but it's rather a plea to give space to ambiguity in life, a life with uncertainty (and therefore also with illness and pain), also in the sciences:
"Ambiguity does not obey logic. The logician says, “To tolerate contradiction is to be indifferent to truth.” Those particular philosophers like playing games of true and false. It is either one thing or the other, never both. But ambiguity is inherently contradictory and insoluble, a bewildering truth of fogs and mists and the unrecognizable figure or phantom or memory or dream that can’t be contained or held in my hands or kept because it is always flying away, and I cannot tell what it is or if it is anything at all. I chase it with words even though it won’t be captured, and every once in a while I come close to it."
This is a view I cannot but fully endorce!
So this is a very specialized, rather difficult book to read. Hustvedt tells about her wanderings along psychologists, neurologists, brain specialists, and about her own in-depth study of the state of affairs in those domains, also illustrated with concrete cases she knows herself or she has heard about or read about. She does this in a rather chaotic, meandering way, which according to the reviews enervate many readers. But for me this just was the charm of this book: anyone who is confronted with major illnesses or disorders cannot but work in this way: searching, wandering, asking questions, trying treatmenst, going from success to disappointment and back.
This book provides a staggering picture of a science that knows only a fraction of how man works in that gray zone between neurology, psychology and brain; a science that constantly contradicts itself and swings from one trend or fashion to another, and nevertheless keeps on launching new theories with a air of certainty, or secretly returns to previously stubbornly opposed visions.
Even Hustvedt herself did not get much further despite all her attempts and perseverence. And I see this too is a source of frustration for many readers. But then they have just missed the point of this book, I would say. Because Hustvedt eventually draws the only possible, pragmatic conclusion: she accepts that her persistent migraine and the tremor-attacks for whatever reason are part of her own identity: "that trembling woman, that's me".
Ultimately, this book for Hustvedt, with all its hesitations and confusion, is not just a plea for acceptance (and fatalism), but it's rather a plea to give space to ambiguity in life, a life with uncertainty (and therefore also with illness and pain), also in the sciences:
"Ambiguity does not obey logic. The logician says, “To tolerate contradiction is to be indifferent to truth.” Those particular philosophers like playing games of true and false. It is either one thing or the other, never both. But ambiguity is inherently contradictory and insoluble, a bewildering truth of fogs and mists and the unrecognizable figure or phantom or memory or dream that can’t be contained or held in my hands or kept because it is always flying away, and I cannot tell what it is or if it is anything at all. I chase it with words even though it won’t be captured, and every once in a while I come close to it."
This is a view I cannot but fully endorce!