
The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey Through Consciousness by Paul Broks
This is a book framed by grief—Broks’s wife died of cancer in middle age—but it is not the usual memoir of loss. Broks has long been a scientist of consciousness, and he sees death, as well as the miracle of waking life, through a bracingly unsentimental lens of neural activity. Which might make for a …