The Brain in Search of Itself Benjamin Ehrlich Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35
Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal is known as the father of modern neuroscience. Cajal was the first to see that the brain is built of discrete cells, the “butterflies of the soul,” as he put it, that hold our memories, thoughts and emotions.
With the same unflinching scrutiny that Cajal applied to cells, biographer Benjamin Ehrlich examines Cajal’s life. In The Brain in Search of Itself, Ehrlich sketches Cajal as he moved through his life, capturing moments both mundane and extraordinary.
Some of the portraits show Cajal as a young boy in the mid-19th century. He was born in the mountains of Spain. As a child, he yearned to be an artist despite his disapproving and domineering father. Other portraits show him as a barber-surgeon’s apprentice, a deeply insecure bodybuilder, a writer of romance stories, a photographer and a military physician suffering from malaria in Cuba.
The book is meticulously researched and utterly comprehensive, covering the time before Cajal’s birth to after his death in 1934 at age 82. Ehrlich pulls out significant moments that bring readers inside Cajal’s mind through his own writings in journals and books. These glimpses help situate Cajal’s scientific discoveries within the broader context of his life.