Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science
By: John Fleischman
Blood, brains and an iron bar
Kelly: ☻☻☻☻
Boy Reader: ☻☻☻
This book straddles the worlds of informative and narrative non-fiction. Phineas Gage lived in 1848 and lived through a dramatic open brain injury. By the end, the reader will know what phrenology is, what cork looks like under a microscope, and what happens if a tamping iron is shot through someone's head -- at just the right angle.
At seventy-five pages, the length is manageable, yet even avid readers will pick up some new vocabulary. For the budding physician, it's a no brainer. (Ha!)
The author obliges our need for gory details about the accident. My favorite sentence: "An Irishman standing by said, 'Sure it was so, sir, for the bar is lying in the road below, all blood and brains.'"
Boy Reader gives it three stars because he prefers purely narrative non-fiction (like Prisoner B-3087 and Every Falling Star). This book relates both the gory story of Phineas Gage's accident, and the drier account of Gage's contribution to the development of brain science.
Four starts from me because (a) I always wanted to be a brain surgeon, and (b) it has the perfect length and complexity for a middle-grade non-fiction book.
Boy Reader: ☻☻☻
This book straddles the worlds of informative and narrative non-fiction. Phineas Gage lived in 1848 and lived through a dramatic open brain injury. By the end, the reader will know what phrenology is, what cork looks like under a microscope, and what happens if a tamping iron is shot through someone's head -- at just the right angle.
At seventy-five pages, the length is manageable, yet even avid readers will pick up some new vocabulary. For the budding physician, it's a no brainer. (Ha!)
The author obliges our need for gory details about the accident. My favorite sentence: "An Irishman standing by said, 'Sure it was so, sir, for the bar is lying in the road below, all blood and brains.'"
Boy Reader gives it three stars because he prefers purely narrative non-fiction (like Prisoner B-3087 and Every Falling Star). This book relates both the gory story of Phineas Gage's accident, and the drier account of Gage's contribution to the development of brain science.
Four starts from me because (a) I always wanted to be a brain surgeon, and (b) it has the perfect length and complexity for a middle-grade non-fiction book.