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This book is about many things. Foremost, it is an autobiography of a smart, hardworking, and principled man. It is also all of the following: a historical account of some of the most important developments in neuroscience over the last one hundred years; an account of how science is done in the modern era, revealing a long, complex, and distinctively collaborative process; in small part, the story of how one of the worst horrors of humankind affected some of its victims and their families throughout their lifetimes; and a commentary on what happened to psychoanalysis as well as, to a lesser extent, to psychiatry, in the latter part of the twentieth century. And, finally, it suggests ways to explore exceptionally intriguing questions about the human mind.
I enjoyed this book tremendously, notwithstanding the pain it sometimes evoked. I am grateful to have been provided with the information it included and to have felt the kinship its stories provided.
The author, Eric R. Kandel, was born on November 7, 1929, in Vienna, Austria. The first memory he chooses to tell us is of his ninth birthday, which began happily with the gift of a shiny blue, remote-controlled car. He played with it inside his family's apartment for the better part of two days, until the Nazis came banging on the door. They took him, his mother, and his brother out of their home, returning them a few days later to find his father missing, the apartment ransacked, and their valuables stolen. Kandel's father was eventually released—one of few Jewish men to be let go after the roundup on Kristallnacht. The author recounts: “Although my family and I lived under the Nazi regime for only a year, the bewilderment,