Welcome to Litsy!

A personal and profound book on the mysteries at the core of our humanness by an acclaimed neuropsychologist, as ambitious as it is timely. 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--Oliver Sacks meets Alain de Botton--on fate, death, consciousness, and what it means to be human. Broks weaves medicine, psychology, history, myth, memoir, and even fiction through some of 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, The Darker the Night, The Brighter the Stars 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.