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History Lessons: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, and the Brain, by Clifton Crais
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An acclaimed scholar tackles his greatest historical puzzle yet―his own abused past and tortured memory
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.
- Sales Rank: #1106121 in Books
- Published on: 2015-05-19
- Released on: 2015-05-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Review
“Writers such as Crais are bringing us one step closer to seeing the conscious mind within the living brain by mixing the familiar tools of memoir with neuroscience. In History Lessons, he re-collects, in a very literal sense, his childhood
” (Cara Parks - The Nation)
“[P]oetic passages combine with Crais’ impish humor to make reading History Lessons a weirdly pleasant sensation. . . .In History Lessons, there is no self-pity; no easy resolution . . . ‘Forgetting is a necessary condition of living,’ he concedes, although, by serving history and the arts, we continue in the telling.” (Atlanta Journal Constitution)
“[P]acks an emotional wallop” (Publishers Weekly)
“This memoir of anguish and struggle is a story of remarkable strength and unlikely, inexplicable resilience.” (Kirkus)
“In this extraordinary work, Clifton Crais deploys his skills as a historian to attempt to overcome his amnesia concerning a traumatic childhood, plagued by an alcoholic mother and a largely neglectful father. His account of his journey into his personal past offers profound insights into the relationship between history and memory, interwoven with new understandings of how memory works, both neurologically and socially, derived from advances in the science of memory. Beautifully written, History Lessons offers valuable insights into the relationship between history and memory, a topic of enormous current controversy among historians. In addition to its contributions to this debate, it offers a highly readable and largely triumphant tale of a young boy who made his way in the world to become a major historian of the travails of others, using the memory of his own childhood wounds to arrive at a deeper understanding of the ‘wounds of the past.’” (Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University)
“Magnificent . . . A searing, deeply moving work.” (Los Angeles Times)
“Well-written and fascinating.” (Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW)
“A splendid book that bolsters a literary memoir with the neuroscience of memory, History Lessons beautifully evokes class, race, and loss in a way utterly nique to New Orleans.” (Dan Baum, bestselling author of Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans)
About the Author
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A compelling memoir and much more
By Sita Ranchod
In this beautifully written memoir Clifton Crais skillfully intertwines the tools of an academic historian and advances in neuroscience with his own struggles to come to terms with his difficult and disjointed childhood.
Drawing on the skills of his craft, Crais discovers that his family’s narrative of past splendor as descendants of “good, pure, French stock” living among New Orleans Creole elite on Esplanade Avenue leaves out more humble beginnings, sugar fortunes made and lost, miscegenation and lives lived “amongst the blacks, prostitutes, street musicians, dockworkers, gamblers and petty crooks.” These historical revisions frame his Aunt Cecile’s madness and his mother’s profound sense of disappointment and loss. For Crais and his siblings, poverty and neglect take a heavy toll in the form of depression, substance abuse and broken relationships. Against all odds, Crais achieves both personal and professional success. In this sense, History Lessons is a captivating story of struggle and triumph which is reason enough to read it.
But History Lessons is much more. Drawing on contemporary debates within history and advances in neuroscience, Crais honestly and poignantly conveys his own struggles to remember and reconstruct his painful past. Born at a time when his parents’ marriage was disintegrating, Crais drifts through childhood moving sporadically between New Orleans, Texas, California, Tunisia and Maryland in the care of various relatives - his mother and grandmother, his father and a succession of wives, his older sister and her family. Often on the edge of fending for himself, as a child he yearns to be cared for and wanted. He struggles to remember the facts, yet has clarity on the emotions he experienced. Despite his success, Crais remains haunted by his early life. Through his elegant prose Crais poignantly conveys the complexities of memory – grappling with what is real and what is imaged, how emotions and senses telescope the past into the present, and the glaring silences around which stories are told.
History Lessons provoked me to think about my own history and the stories we all tell about our lives. They are likely more complicated, more fragile, and more elusive than we realize. I highly recommend History Lessons.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A Fantastic Read
By Peter Brown
Written with elegance, this is a heartbreaking story of poverty, childhood, and a historian's quest to discover a personal past. Craig's uses his journey to clearly describe the very human neurobiology of memory making and ultimately the production of history. I could not put this book down.
Peter J Brown
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Painfully relevant
By bootstraps
Beautifully written, thoughtful but not candy coated. unsettling familiar events. Lessons, grievances, things never quite clear nearly come to light, understanding of the need to make sense of that which makes no sense.
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