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Adobe DRM
Product Details
Simon & Schuster, May 2009
eBook, 304 pages
ISBN-10: 1416588108
ISBN-13: 9781416588108
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Description
With more than one in ten Americans—and more than one in five families—affected, the phenomenon of migraine is widely prevalent yet often ignored or misdiagnosed. For Andrew Levy, his migraines were occasional reminders of a persistent illness that he’d wrestled with half his life. Then in 2006 Levy was struck almost daily by a series of debilitating migraines that kept him essentially bedridden for months, imprisoned by pain and nausea that retreated only briefly in gentler afternoon light. When possible, he kept careful track of what triggered an onset and in luminous prose recounts his struggle to live with migraines, his meticulous attempts at calibrating his lifestyle to combat and avoid them, and most tellingly, the personal relationship a migraineur develops—an almost Stockholm syndrome–like attachment—with the indescribable pain, delirium, and hallucinations. Levy researched how personalities and artists throughout history—Alexander Pope, Freud, Virginia Woolf, even Elvis—dealt with their migraines and candidly describes his rehabilitation with the aid of prescription drugs and his eventual reemergence into the world, back to work and writing.
An enthralling blend of memoir and provocative analysis, A Brain Wider Than the Sky offers rich insights into an illness whose effects are too often discounted and whose sufferers are too often overlooked
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Introduction"A most remarkable book. A Brain Wider Than the Sky is learned, witty, allusive, and poetic -- and migraine becomes, for Levy, a window into the whole landscape of body and mind, health and disease, and the sheer complexity of being alive."
-- Oliver Sacks, author of Migraine and Musicophilia
"This is a wonderful hybrid of a book about that most metaphysical of pains, the migraine headache. Part memoir, part historical inquiry, part philosophical meditation, A Brain Wider Than the Sky takes its reader on a physical and psychological journey and shows us that beauty and tranquility can be found in the least likely of places."
-- Ann Packer, author of Songs With out Words and The Dive from Clausen's Pier
"Andrew Levy has turned migraines into a window on the human condition. His epic, erudite, obsessive, despairingly isolated battle with this half-mystical demon, ranging across civilization but always ending up in a dark room, has eerie resonance for those who do not suffer -- until the surprise ending, whereupon we see the common ground."
-- Suzannah Lessard, author of Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family
"[Levy] collects headaches like rare butterflies, and he has a rare, possibly singular gift for fitting words to them...His eloquence is all the more remarkable because migraines are a sinkhole for language....encourages us to generalize from his example to take in the true dimensions of what is still a largely silent epidemic."
-- Lev Grossman, Time
"Andrew Levy's beautiful memoir, A Brain Wider Than the Sky, is welcome relief....an affecting, readable account of the pain of migraine and the weird wonder of it. Levy seamlessly glides from the experience of his own suffering to broader neurological and historical realms...[his] prose shines...beautiful description and compelling research...unflinching self-scrutiny is what elevates A Brain Wider Than the Sky beyond many less successful memoirs of illness....the irrefutable reality is that Levy's suffering is not his alone, and the consequences of that fact are where the heart of this fine book lies."
-- Christine Montross, The Washington Post
"I love this book. It's wonderful, dangerous, compelling, nerve-rattling, and absolutely brilliant. It is intimate and yet of enormous scope, it is funny and yet deeply vulnerable, and, most important, it is just so smart as it portrays both the larger public history of migraine and the intensely personal history of Levy's own experiences with this debilitating and ongoing neurological event."
-- Fred Leebron, author of In the Middle of All This and Five Figures
"[Andrew Levy] produces a dynamic portrayal of the migraineurs' world, an ominous alternative universe where the subtlest sight, sound, smell or innocent event can trigger an attack....Sufferers will empathize; most general readers will sympathize. An impressive meditation on a devastating affliction."
-- Kirkus
Wall Street Journal Online, December 9, 2009
...tips for keeping stress at bay. Dr. Savard will also answer questions from readers at askdrmarie.net "A Brain Wider Than the Sky" by Andrew Levy ($25) Migraine patients are often advised to keep a headache diary to help determine their ...
Blogcritics.org, September 23, 2009
...sufferer's) use of metaphor fails to adequately describe these “nerve storms in the brain” to a non-sufferer. Andrew Levy, author of A Brain Wider Than the Sky, will immediately identify this article as written by a non-sufferer, a ...
Blogcritics.org, September 23, 2009
...sufferer's) use of metaphor fails to adequately describe these “nerve storms in the brain” to a non-sufferer. Andrew Levy, author of A Brain Wider Than the Sky, will immediately identify this article as written by a non-sufferer, a ...
Cleveland Live, August 16, 2009
...a migraine diary had better write like an angel with a flaming pen. To my surprise and pleasure, Andrew Levy mostly does, in his astute and lucid 'A Brain Wider Than The Sky.' Levy, an English professor at Butler University in Indianapolis, ...
Miami Herald, July 7, 2009
...A BRAIN WIDER THAN THE SKY: A Migraine Diary. Andrew Levy. Simon & Schuster. 289 pages. $25 Memoirs of illness and injury too frequently end up either as proud testimonies of endurance ...
NUVO, June 1, 2009
...will be at Big Hat books tomorrow evening, Tuesday, June 2nd, beginning at 6pm Launch Party, Reading, Booksigning Andrew Levy's new book from Simon & Schuster 'A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary' 'A most remarkable book. A Brain ...
WHNT-TV, May 27, 2009
...headaches affect more than 1 in 10 Americans. Yet they are poorly understood. In his new memoir, 'A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary,' Andrew Levy writes about his pain and attempts to give it a description. He also searches for ...
