The Case for Love
My Adventures In Other Minds
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:1st Jul '21
Should be back in stock very soon
An exhilarating journey into the unfathomable depths of the human mind, from the acclaimed author of Let Me Not Be Mad.
What does it take to care for a stranger? Really care.
The Case for Love is a reflection on a career treating patients with brain trauma - people whose thoughts and feelings are largely unknowable - and how and why those treatments failed.
It is a reconstruction of three haunting cases in which the patients were tragically misunderstood - and an attempt through the power of the imagination to understand and make amends.
It then describes the author's abandonment of his career and his tumultuous quest for healing and redemption.
It is also a story of intimate relationships, pets, fatherhood and heartbreak, culminating in a moment of psychedelic transcendence and rebirth.
It is about the overpowering need for connection - and how, increasingly, we are trapped in ourselves.
It is a meditation on empathy and an act of atonement.
It is a unique, hybrid work of clinical case study and pure invention that destroys the boundary between fact and fiction in order to bring us face-to-face with the shocking, liberating truth.
__________
Praise for Let Me Not Be Mad
'Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka's 'The Country Doctor', and you still won't quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book' William Fiennes
'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I've read' Olivia Laing
'A perfectly extraordinary - not to mention extraordinarily perfect - tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book' Stephen Fry
'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths' Stewart Lee
'A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story' Roddy Doyle
'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian
Part memoir, part case study, part work of fiction ... exhilarating ... this is really what he means by love: one mind truly knowing another ... rich ... claustrophobic ... Benjamin is at times a virtuosic writer ... an artful book, and there are moments of sublimity ... beautiful and moving -- M M Owen * Times Literary Supplement *
Benjamin writes beautifully and with exceptional insight, a tormented soul who knows the truth of the worst torments -- Andrew Anthony * Observer *
A blindsiding dissection of the poetry of pain, dazzlingly scripted, with craft and integrity. Compulsive and shocking -- Iain Sinclair
With clinical precision, coupled with the sensibility of a poet, A K Benjamin lets the reader imagine the inter-twined world of a neuropsychologist and his patients -- Caroline Elton, author of Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors
At first I thought this an exceptionally well written book in the genre of medical story telling. The more I read the more I realised it's an exceptional book in a genre all of its own. Insightful, wonderfully well observed and beautifully written -- Suzanne O'Sullivan (on Let Me Not Be Mad)
A treasure of a book. Intricately woven and deeply intimate, it reveals things that astonish, surprise and improve us -- James Rhodes (on Let Me Not Be Mad)
A truly astonishing journey into and out of the mind. Not content to pin you down with the intense intimacy of his storytelling Benjamin dramatises some of the most profound and intractable issues in neuroscience and psychiatry. I've never read anything like it -- Professor Mark Lythgoe, UCL (on Let Me Not Be Mad)
A mental-health memoir like no other ... a genre-defying wake-up call of a book ... compelling ... clever humane ... holding back a sly twist for the end * Observer (on Let Me Not Be Mad) *
Like a meeting of Oliver Sacks and Hunter S Thompson ... this is not a simple narrative of striking cases written by a far-seeing practitioner. It's a turbo-charged race -- Lisa Appignanesi * New Statesman (on Let Me Not Be Mad) *
ISBN: 9781847926197
Dimensions: 230mm x 143mm x 19mm
Weight: 294g
176 pages