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    Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph
    Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph
    Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph
    Ebook362 pages4 hours

    Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph

    By Amy Ellis Nutt

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    On a sunny fall afternoon in 1988, Jon Sarkin was playing golf when, without a whisper of warning, his life changed forever. As he bent down to pick up his golf ball, something strange and massive happened inside his head; part of his brain seemed to unhinge, to split apart and float away. For an utterly inexplicable reason, a tiny blood vessel, thin as a thread, deep inside the folds of his gray matter had suddenly shifted ever so slightly, rubbing up against his acoustic nerve. Any noise now caused him excruciating pain.

    After months of seeking treatment to no avail, in desperation Sarkin resorted to radical deep-brain surgery, which seemed to go well until during recovery his brain began to bleed and he suffered a major stroke. When he awoke, he was a different man. Before the stroke, he was a calm, disciplined chiropractor, a happily married husband and father of a newborn son. Now he was transformed into a volatile and wildly exuberant obsessive, seized by a manic desire to create art, devoting virtually all his waking hours to furiously drawing, painting, and writing poems and letters to himself, strangely detached from his wife and child, and unable to return to his normal working life. His sense of self had been shattered, his intellect intact but his way of being drastically altered. His art became a relentless quest for the right words and pictures to unlock the secrets of how to live this strange new life. And what was even stranger was that he remembered his former self.

    In a beautifully crafted narrative, award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Amy Ellis Nutt interweaves Sarkin’s remarkable story with a fascinating tour of the history of and latest findings in neuroscience and evolution that illuminate how the brain produces, from its web of billions of neurons and chaos of liquid electrical pulses, the richness of human experience that makes us who we are. Nutt brings vividly to life pivotal moments of discovery in neuroscience, from the shocking “rebirth” of a young girl hanged in 1650 to the first autopsy of an autistic savant’s brain, and the extraordinary true stories of people whose personalities and cognitive abilities were dramatically altered by brain trauma, often in shocking ways.

    Probing recent revelations about the workings of creativity in the brain and the role of art in the evolution of human intelligence, she reveals how Jon Sarkin’s obsessive need to create mirrors the earliest function of art in the brain. Introducing major findings about how our sense of self transcends the bounds of our own bodies, she explores how it is that the brain generates an individual “self” and how, if damage to our brains can so alter who we are, we can nonetheless be said to have a soul.

    For Jon Sarkin, with his personality and sense of self permanently altered, making art became his bridge back to life, a means of reassembling from the shards of his former self a new man who could rejoin his family and fashion a viable life. He is now an acclaimed artist who exhibits at some of the country’s most prestigious venues, as well as a devoted husband to his wife, Kim, and father to their three children. At once wrenching and inspiring, this is a story of the remarkable human capacity to overcome the most daunting obstacles and of the extraordinary workings of the human mind.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFree Press
    Release dateApr 5, 2011
    ISBN9781439150078
    Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph
    Author

    Amy Ellis Nutt

    Amy Ellis Nutt is a science journalist at the Washington Post and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Her most recent book is Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family.

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    Reviews for Shadows Bright as Glass

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      The book tells the story of one man's experience of surviving a brain injury and includes a lot of recent discoveries about how the brain works, as well as other case histories.
    • 4/5
      I first discovered Jon Sarkin's work at the Gloucester, MA Law and Water Gallery. His bold colors and graphics, simultaneously childlike and gripping, are a shocking pleasure to savor. So would this book be, IF IT INCLUDED ANY COLOR PLATES OF HIS WORK. To write about an artist as unique as Sarkin without displaying his talent makes the reader feel completely cheated. The tale itself, of Sarkin's complete personality change due to a damaged blood vessel in his brain and the stroke that followed his surgery, is well told by the author. She also explores other fascinating instances of brain injuries that led to important discoveries of which parts of the brain control our thoughts, emotions, and abilities. Sarkin's life with his wife and his three children are sadly rendered as his brain causes him to focus strictly on himself and to make him become basically all ego.The most amazing part of Sarkin's story is his response to the tragic death of his brother.Reader's advisory: google Sarkin and view his work before you read the book. Then enjoy the hell out of it.
    • 4/5
      A bit too melodramatic when the author repeatedly tries to define & describe the subject's mental state. Considering the complexity of the brain damage he suffered this may be excused. An outsider cannot describe the feelings & experience - you cannot describe it unless you've been there, & if you've been there you may well have lost the ability to describe. Why is his art commercially successful? Because of his story (success, loss, recovery), or because it appeals to fundamental elements of the brain? That would have been worth some discussion. An aspect not covered is the use of art as therapy for stroke victims in general. Overall a fair description of developments in neurology, & the move from analysis of the brain via pathology (i.e. when something goes wrong) to observing the normal brain using such modern tools as fMRI.

    Book preview

    Shadows Bright as Glass - Amy Ellis Nutt

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