In Search Of Memory.

KANDEL, Eric R.

Item Number: 100736

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

First edition of the scientist’s autobiography which deals with the groundbreaking work on the biological process of memory, which earned him the Nobel Prize. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For John The brain contracts our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotion and controls our actions. Best Eric Kandel.” Fine in a fine dust jacket.

While most memoirs merely give the reader the contents of memory, this remarkable account by a pioneering neurobiologist actually opens up the cellular and biochemical structure of memory and details the epoch-making science that has uncovered that structure. Through the doors of his own memory, Kandel revisits the Vienna of his childhood, a city recalled with appreciation for its intellectual and artistic life and with antipathy for the anti-Semitism that swept through the region in the thirties, forcing the Kandel family to flee to New York. Kandel carried a career-shaping interest in Freud with him to Brooklyn, but he soon realized that the biology of the brain could explain more about mental processes than could Freud's theorizing. "[A] scrupulously detailed yet magnificently panoramic autobiography" (The New York Times).