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"A powerfully written book, stemming directly from Michael Paul Mason's experience with hundreds of brain-injury patients, Head Cases sounds an alarm bell for our health care system, reminding us how difficult it is for people with such injuries to get adequate treatment. But it reveals, too, how in many cases, given time and the right sort of expert therapy, the brain is capable of remarkable recovery and adaptation."
--Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings

"In these cases, and several others like them, Mr. Mason's accomplishment is formidable, restoring to each subject a measure of human dignity, achieving through sympathy and curiosity insight like that which pulses through genuine literature. These are not people whose lives have ended, he suggests, only changed, and we recognize in their jagged, altered lives something like allegories for our own experience."
--Casey Schwartz, New York Sun

"Mason deftly conveys the frustrations and inequities of traumatic brain injury... [he] performs a valuable service by calling attention to the plight of the brain injured. From reading Oliver Sacks, I had come to think of neurological dysfunction as an almost fanciful affliction, its victims like characters in a work of magical realism. Mason has provided a needed, and sobering, account of reality."
--Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

"Mason's words will touch your heart but more importantly open your eyes to the harsh realities endured by mounting numbers of traumatic brain injury survivors."
--Michael Wallis, Tulsa World

"Mason visited Iraq, so his experiences will give readers information they've been sheltered from too long. But no less vivid, heartbreaking or movingly written are other cases. In "The Hermit of Hollywood Boulevard," for instance, a snowboard crash left a young man with more than 120 seizures monthly. After exhausting his options as well as his family's finances, he committed himself to a psychiatric crisis unit, his only venue for free care."
--Irene Wanner, The Seattle Times

"As a writer, Mr. Mason stakes out a position midway between Oliver Sacks and Oprah Winfrey. He goes light on the science, presenting his case studies primarily as human dramas. We meet the loved ones, revisit the hometowns, relive in minute detail the horrific accidents that caused the injuries."
--William Grimes, New York Times

"There's no shortage of books on neurological patients with brain injuries, but Head Cases, the new book by Michael Paul Mason, is one of my recent favorites. Mason brings a unique perspective to the tragic tales, as he's not a neurologist or a neuroscientist. Instead, he's a brain injury case manager based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so the stories are as much about the bureaucratic maze of insurance claims as they are about the hippocampus."
--Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust was a Neuroscientist

"Michael Mason’s Head Cases strikes just the right balance between analysis of how the brain works and repairs itself."
--Cynthia Paddock Doroghazi, author of Searching for the Open Door

"This former case manager has a heart so  big it's gone "nationwide"-and he writes like a million bucks."
--Kurt Rabin, Free Lance-Star

"Mr. Mason, with the compassion and astute observation of a skilled case worker, relates story after story that are as captivating and inspiring as they are sobering and heartbreaking."
--Dr. Walt Larimore, co-author, His Brain, Her Brain

"Mason writes with passion and urgency about the unheralded but compelling stories of Americans injured in car accidents or through a miscalculation while snowboarding... He also tells stories of tremendous courage and perseverance as survivors and their families work to re-establish the everyday skills they had before their injury. The strange effects of neurological damage will draw fans of Oliver Sacks, but Mason's poignant and caring accounts of his clients' lives are sure to touch the hearts of a wide range of readers.
--Publisher's Weekly

" Dispassionate neuroscience meets fierce advocacy in this heartbreaking but hopeful look at the little-understood world of those who suffer traumatic brain injuries... Mason's goal here is to convey awareness, not to uplift. Intriguing case histories, related with a personal passion that sets Mason's book apart from Oliver Sacks's cooler writings on the subject."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Mason succeeds in giving a strong voice and profound humanity to its victims... This unusually well-written, disturbing book is highly recommended. "
-- James Swanton, Harlem Hospital, Library Journal

"Using the words and actions of brain injury survivors, Head Cases poignantly chronicles the everyday struggles, search for help, and hope for recovery after traumatic brain injury.  Mason brings educated insight to readers who are blissfully unaware of the life-altering, often debilitating, aftermath of neurotrauma.  Head Cases is a must-read glimpse into what life with brain injury is really like. "
--Susan Connors, CEO, Brain Injury Association of America

"Mason describes in detail the devastating effects of brain damage, the myriad ways the brain tries to compensate for that damage, and the frustrations of trying to get appropriate care. Mason writes that the patients he represents 'may not even know I exist.' But he is, as he puts it, their voice. With Head Cases, he has also become their public advocate."
-- Jane Bosveld, Discover

"Mason is an experienced case manager who has worked with hundreds of individuals with brain injuries and their families... he has traveled throughout the United States and even into Iraq to write about the 'real people' who sustained brain injuries from various kinds of external physical forces and internal occurrences. Mason writes not just about the injury, per se, but about the unraveling of people and the courage each person had to pull the broken pieces of their lives together in some way, shape or form. As importantly, Mason also focuses on the uniqueness of each brain injury and the vivid glimpses each injury provides us about the inner workings of the human brain."
--Ron Savage, Brain Injury Professional

" Michael Paul Mason’s “Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath” brings vital initiation, through his selection of 12 amazing patients; 12 apostolic accounts of lives of innocence uprooted by unimaginable experience, which Mason explores with awe, passion, humanity and skill."
--Simon Lewis, Truthdig.com

 

Available in Bookstores Nationwide

Pick up Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath from your local bookseller at BookSense.com.

Or order online through Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, or Powell's Books.

 

Copyright© 2008 Michael Paul Mason