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Inviting the author to Book Club can be a high-risk strategy. There is always the possibility that no one will have liked it, and an awkward hour will ensue, littered with disingenuous attempts to spin a positive angle. There was no danger of that when Adam Zeman, Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology at Peninsula Medical School, joined us to discuss about his second book: 'A portrait of the brain'. 1
It is a beautiful account of the brain, starting at the atomic level, then gradually zooming out chapter by chapter, ending at the level of the soul. In a style reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, Zeman uses neurological case histories to illustrate our understanding of each layer. Several readers independently drew a comparison between the two authors, and so we were interested to hear that Zeman has indeed been influenced by much of Sacks' work. Passages on organic chemistry and discoveries in basic neuroscience are not just interspersed within the text-they are woven into the overlying story with humanity and empathy, and it...