Brainstorm

The Pulitzer Prize–nominated author chronicles navigating the traditional western medical system during his wife's battle with a brain aneurysm.

Brainstorm is the candid and powerful memoir of a couple's harrowing experience of an aneurysm and their road to recovery. It is a journey of love, devotion, and a clash of medical beliefs and countercultures. The fierce resolve of the author and his wife is extraordinary, inspiring, and matched only by the tremendous competence and care of the medical system—one to which the author initially stands in opposition, but that he later learns to admire and respect.

This book is for anyone who has experienced the fear and difficulties of a major illness. The themes, truths, and above all, the compassion that this book shares will be familiar not just to the nine million Americans affected by aneurysms, but to anyone whose family has been touched by a medical trauma. Filled with raw emotion, Brainstorm affords quiet but powerful support to those suffering similar circumstances and strives to tell them that they are not alone.

"Raw and honest. His writing is . . . poetic, cynical, humorous and above all candid. He openly acknowledges his sense of helplessness, his pain in seeing his wife suffer, and the inappropriate actions brought on by his mental anguish and rebelliousness." —Library of Clean Reads