Non-Fiction Book #2 in 2009 – My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor

from Publishers Weekly on amazon.com:
In 1996, 37-year-old neuroanatomist Taylor experienced a massive stroke that erased her abilities to walk, talk, do mathematics, read, or remember details. Her remarkable story details her slow recovery of those abilities (and the cultivation of new ones) and recounts exactly what happened with her brain. Read proficiently by the author, this is a fascinating memoir of the brain’s remarkable resiliency and of one woman’s determination to regain her faculties and recount her experience for the benefit of others. Taylor repeatedly describes her “stroke of insight”-a tremendous gratitude for, and connection with, the cells of her body and of every living thing-and says that although she is fully recovered, she is not the same driven, type-A scientist that she was before the stroke. Her holistic approach to healing will be valuable to stroke survivors and their caregivers, who can pick up suggestions from Taylor’s moving accounts of how her mother faithfully loved her back to life.

My thoughts:

• There is a VIDEO of Jill giving a speech on amazon, click here to watch it

• I want to like this book and I do enjoy the parts when Jill described what went through her mind that day, and how her mother helped her recover – eg her mother had to give her multiple choice questions, instead of yes/no question, so Jill can search through the mental pictures what her mum was asking. And I do appreciate the list of “40 things I need the most” for caregivers (not that I am caring for anyone with brain trauma, but since I work in healthcare, if I ever come across a patient with such condition, this list would be helpful.)

• But there were parts where I just skimmed… the part where she wrote about inner peace etc. I guess part of it is the writing style – it just couldn’t capture my attention. I guess I was expecting more about the actual account of the day she had the stroke and how she recovered and re-learned in the 7-8 years (she had to re-learn ABC, math etc), rather than the spiritual side of things.

• Last year I read Where is the Mango Princess? by Cathy Crimmins which I really enjoyed reading. Cathy’s husband suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and she detailed the “before” and “after” of his accident. I guess I was expecting My Stroke of Insight to be a similar book, which probably isn’t fair but I was interested to read something from the other perspective.

• The author mentioned The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) a bit, and it just happened that I did a charity photo shoot for their walk in Rochester MN last year, you can see the photos here.