History Lessons: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, and the Brain

✍ Scribed by Crais, Clifton

• Book ID: 108288827
• Publisher: Overlook
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 615 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781468309805

✦ Synopsis

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...