Shadows Bright as Glass (Amy Ellis Nutt)

This fascinating book describes in detail the experiences of Jon Sarkin, who suffered a massive stroke that tore him loose from his former self and shattered his experience of time and space. He found peace and his way of connecting back to life through art, as he began  doodling compulsively and it expanded  into a national career as an artist. Woven into Sarkin's story is much information about the history of neuroscience and the search for the nature of consciousness and identity. This book is much more accurate and well-researched than the Taylor book I read recently, though not without its own errors. The author repeatedly conflates information seen by the left eye with information in the left visual field, for example, and reports straight-faced that "Some scientists have suggested that there are more synapses in the human brain than there are atomic particles in the universe (p. 24)." Any scientist who suggested this does not deserve to be reported in a serious work of nonfiction. Overall, though, I found the story compelling, and my only real complaint is that there are no pictures of Sarkin's art, aside from the cover.