There’s this box of books I have, you see. I’ve always been reluctant to put these volumes out on any shelf, namely because I have a young, curious daughter who loves to see how things come apart, and whether they go back together again. Obviously, this isn’t good for the books. Bradbury’s The Cat’s Pajamas turned to litter a while ago. That wasn’t the biggest tragedy. But the uncorrected proof of Streiber and Kunetka’s War Day? Really, I wasn’t paying attention to what I had. I somehow inherited the book from a former girlfriend who picked it up in a secondhand shop because she liked that one about the aliens. I didn’t know, or else it would have been stashed away in the box. The old copy of Joyce Carol Oates’ The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature wouldn’t have. Sure, it was a thirty year-old paperback, and I should have been more careful. Hell, I should have actually read the thing before it got scattered all over the living room one morning when I didn’t wake up on time.
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What makes Thornton’s take most compelling is the lucidity with which she approaches exactly what we know and don’t know about the brain. Every day, we’re bombarded with exponentially replicating headlines about new “sciences” like neuromarketing, which, despite the enormous budgets poured into them by the world’s shortcut-hungry Fortune 500, remain the phrenology of our time, a tragic manifestation of the disconnect between how much we want to manipulate the brain and how little we actually know about its intricately connected, non-compartmentalizable functions.
Southern California Writers' Conference 