About the Book
For fans of Siddhartha Mukherjee's first-person approach to medical history, as well as fans of Oliver Sachs' HALLUCINATIONS or Carl Zimmer's SOUL MADE FLESH
In Kate Cole-Adams' deft and intimate narrative style, readers bump up against the edge of the unknowable, against questions about consciousness and trauma and the soul
Reads like an episode of the WNYC program Radiolab
Given the personal angle of this narrative nonfiction, extensive broadcast media campaign planned on public radio, science programming, and podcasts
Because Cole-Adams intertwines her own surgical history into her history of anesthesia in medicine, this book is an excellent selection for book clubs and reading groups
This history of medicine is a perennially fascinating and rich subject matter (in October 2017, Scientific American/FSG will publish
Lindsey Fitzharris' The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine 9780374117290), so widespread media attention expected
About the Author :
KATE COLE-ADAMS is a journalist and novelist. Her debut novel, Walking to the Moon, was published in 2008. She lives in Melbourne with her family.
Review :
Praise for Anesthesia An obsessive, mystical, terrifying, and even phantasmagorical exploration of anesthesia's shadowy terra incognita. --The New Yorker
Ms. Cole-Adams's journey was spurred by her discovery in 2010 that she was to be scheduled for major spinal surgery. A novelist as well as a journalist . . . she writes fluidly and dramatically, using her travels, researches, and interviews to trace her anxieties about her forthcoming general anesthetic back to their roots. Her book is as much a diary of the writing process as a scientific investigation. --The Wall Street Journal
Cole-Adams gives us something valuable: a humanistic meditation on pain and our will to forgetting . . . Anesthesia . . . serves as an apt metaphor for our cultural impulse toward numbness . . . Awake to the eventualities of suffering and death, Anesthesia suggests, we might treat ourselves--and each other--more kindly. --Los Angeles Review of Books
Kate Cole-Adams's new book, Anesthesia . . . us[es] a combination of memoir and journalistic inquiry to investigate what consciousness really is. Reading Anesthesia, one learns a great deal about the practicalities of anesthesia, the errors that are made, the attitudes of medical professionals about anesthesia, even the history of anesthesia and how (gruesomely) invasive surgery was done prior to its invention. --The Cut
Cole-Adams [also] brings together many historical figures in a smooth narrative . . . The prose is vivid. Many students of anesthesia and of medical history will enjoy the way that Cole-Adams weaves eclectic material into a coherent saga. --Jason Zhensheng Qu and Theodore A. Alston, Journal of Anesthesia History
For those who wonder what becomes of the body while it is undergoing general anesthesia--perhaps the closest that many of us have been to the experience of death--this book looks at the notion of being rendered unconscious from a panoply of sources. A must-read for anyone who woke from surgery and couldn't remember anything about the experience. --Signature Reads
Her voice is expressive, empathetic and smart . . . a compelling book." --The Spectator
Elegantly and, at times, heart-breakingly parsing the murky space between presence and absence, Cole-Adams has crafted a mesmerizingly unique memoir that is bound to haunt readers well beyond the last page. --Winnipeg Free Press
If you've ever gone under--or even if you haven't--the book will horrify you. --Los Angeles Review of Books
Her book explores the terrifying topic of anesthesia awareness . . . Cole-Adams blends bits of pharmacology, neurology, philosophy, and ethics with interviews of patients, researchers, and anesthesiologists . . . with big, baffling questions about the nature of consciousness and memory. --Booklist
Cole-Adams . . . mingles her own experiences under anesthesia with those of other patients and doctors, producing a personal work that is a mix of agony and insight. --Publishers Weekly
Cole-Adams blends research, reflection, and memoir to try to grapple with the meaning of consciousness . . . These are thought-provoking questions, and Cole-Adams presents a lyrical journey through the vital question of what it means to be human. --Kirkus Reviews
With Anesthesia, Kate Cole-Adams has given us a gift. She explores not only the concepts but the characters who hope to understand the shadowy world of the anesthetized mind. However, Cole-Adams transforms from being an observer to a fellow journeyer, providing authentic insight and transmitting the excitement of those who believe that these drugs are ethereal keys that could unlock the vault of consciousness itself. --George Mashour, author of Neuroscientific Foundations of Anesthesiology
I think [Anesthesia] is utterly brilliant. I will read anything this woman writes forever more. She is Just. So. Good. Human, funny, insightful, supersmart, a most original and perceptive writer. I ended the book in tears. It is not just about medical stuff, but deeply personal stuff. About the psyche, and pain of all kinds, and triumphing, surviving, exploring, being brave and powerful and honest. About what is said and what isn't, about listening, about dreams and hypnosis and consciousness, which is to say, about our deepest selves. You might be getting the picture: I adored it to bits. --Charlotte Wood, author of The Natural Way of Things
A work of splendid richness and depth, driven by a curiosity so intense that it hazards at times the extreme boundaries of the sayable. --Helen Garner, author of Everywhere I Look
Kate Cole-Adams has written an insightful and moving exploration of general anesthesia: a must-read for anesthetists and their patients. --Professor Kate Leslie, head of research in the Department of Anaesthesia and Pain Management, Royal Melbourne Hospital; former head of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists
This book is a compelling exploration from a patient perspective of the still poorly understood phenomenon of 'anesthesia', and of the uncertain border between being unconscious and awake. Much of this material will be new not only to patients but also to many practitioners. --Professor Jaideep Pandit MA, BM, DPhil, FRCA, FFPMRCA, DM, Consultant Anaesthetist, Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust & Fellow St John's College
