History Lessons: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, and the Brain

Crais, Clifton

ISBN 10: 1468310178 / ISBN 13: 9781468310177

Published by Abrams Press, 2015

About this Item

Former library copy with library stamps on fly-title and title page; some edgewear; some wear.

Seller Inventory # 23011502

Bibliographic Details

• Title: History Lessons: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, and the Brain
• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1468310178
• ISBN 13: 9781468310177
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography
  • History

About this title

Synopsis

Born in Louisiana to a soon-to-be absent father and an alcoholic mother—who tried to drown him in a bathtub when he was three—Clifton Crais spent his childhood perched beside his mother on a too-tall bar stool, living with relatives too old or infirmed to care for him, or rambling on his own through New Orleans, a city both haunted and created by memory. Indeed, it is memory—both elusive and essential—that forms the center of Crais’s beautifully rendered memoir History Lessons. In an effort to restore his own, Crais brings the tools of his formal training as a historian to bear on himself and his family. He interviews his sisters and his mother, revisits childhood homes and pores over documentary evidence: plane tickets, postmarks, court and medical records, crumbling photo albums. Probing family lore, pushing past silences and exhuming long-buried family secrets, he arrives, ultimately, at the deepest reaches of the brain. Crais examines the science of memory and forgetting, from the ways in which experience shapes the developing brain to the mechanisms that cause the chronic childhood amnesia—the most common and least understood form of amnesia—from which he suffers. Part memoir, part narrative science and part historical detective story, History Lessons is a provocative, exquisitely crafted investigation into what it means to be human.

About the Authors

Clifton Crais is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Emory University, where he teaches courses on history, violence, and memory. He holds a doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of five books, including Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, with Pamela Scully. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Clifton Crais is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Emory University, where he teaches courses on history, violence, and memory. He holds a doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of five books, including Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, with Pamela Scully. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.