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This book is Professor Luria's second in the genre which he created in The mind of a mnemonist, a combination of what may be called psycho-biography—in that it is about one individual—with scientific writing, in that it is also based on neuro-physiology which has developed into physiological psychology. It is also a book by two authors: the hero, sub-lieutenant Zasetsky, who wrote almost 3,000 pages of diaries over the twenty-five years following his brain injury in 1943, and his doctor, who extracted passages from those notebooks and linked them with observations, comments and background anatomical information. The book is very compressed, a boon to those who have a lot of professional reading to fit into too little time and who dislike spun-out writing.
At the same time as offering praise on those grounds, this reviewer would like to have had a date given for each of the diary extracts, because the rate of Zasetsky's (partial) recovery of abilities does not emerge as clearly as do the other recorded facts. For example, Luria writes (p. 36): ‘Let us run through his recollections of the first days and weeks after he was wounded the opening sections of his journal,’ but he does not tell us how soon after the wound Zasetsky was able to begin the enterprise of keeping a diary. It is only hinted at much later (p. 83): ‘He started this story before the war ended and continued work on it for twenty-five years’ (author's italics).
On only one occasion (p. 70) are we told the date of writing, when a sad falling-off of painfully acquired abilities was perhaps beginning to occur: ‘During the last few years I've had considerable blocks in reading and my pace has become even slower. What's more, letters seem to escape my span of vision more and more often. Once (2 May 1967)