History Lessons: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, and the Brain - Hardcover

Crais, Clifton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1468303686 ISBN 13: 9781468303681

Publisher: Abrams Press, 2014

Synopsis

Indeed, it is memory―both elusive and essential―that forms the center of Crais’s beautifully rendered memoir History Lessons. In an effort to restore his own, Crais brings the tools of his formal training as a historian to bear on himself and his family. He interviews his sisters and his mother, revisits childhood homes and pores over documentary evidence: plane tickets, postmarks, court and medical records, crumbling photo albums. Probing family lore, pushing past silences and exhuming long-buried family secrets, he arrives, ultimately, at the deepest reaches of the brain. Crais examines the science of memory and forgetting, from the ways in which experience shapes the developing brain to the mechanisms that cause the chronic childhood amnesia―the most common and least understood form of amnesia―from which he suffers. Part memoir, part narrative science and part historical detective story, History Lessons is a provocative, exquisitely crafted investigation into what it means to be human.

About this title

About the Author

Clifton Crais is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Emory University, where he teaches courses on history, violence, and memory.  He holds a doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of five books, including Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, with Pamela Scully. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Edition details

• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1468303686
• ISBN 13: 9781468303681
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272