Psychiatrist Nora Volkow at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York pioneers brain imaging to investigate the effects of drug addiction on the brain.
She’s a fan of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and has just finished After the Quake (Harvill, 2002), a story of lives affected by the Kobe earthquake. Volkow also enjoyed Murakami’s non-fiction account of the gas attack on Tokyo’s subway in Underground (Harvill, 2001).
Other favourites are Benjamin’s Crossing: A novel by Jay Parini (Henry Holt, 1998), a look at the life of literary critic Walter Benjamin, a German Jew who died while fleeing from the Nazis, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s memoirs Vivir…
