The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s STory, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches

“A profound and powerful work of essential reporting.”
—Christine Kenneally, New York Times Book Review

“Beautifully written, deeply personal, and rigorously researched.”
Washington Post

“Bergner's heartfelt book threads the stories of three fascinating patients and raises urgent questions about how we view and treat mental illness.”
People Magazine

“In book after book, Daniel Bergner has dramatized hard subjects—an American prison, a West African war, sexuality, race—with all the compassion and courage of a great writer. But he's outdone himself in The Mind and the Moon, where he explores the most perilous region of all and finds extraordinary suffering, beauty, and common humanity. This is a troubling, exhilarating work of science and high art.”
—George Packer, author of Last Best Hope, Our Man, and The Unwinding

The Mind and the Moon offers readers a critical, wide-ranging tour through the maze of modern biological psychiatry, interrogating some of its most widely accepted premises. Daniel Bergner’s accounts of the struggles of three very different people, including his own brother, are overflowing with sensitivity, wisdom, heart, and soul. This is a work of hard-won perspective and intense empathy—intimate and heartbreaking, deeply personal and lyrically powerful.”
—Robert Kolker, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Hidden Valley Road

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More Books by Daniel Bergner

“Deeply moving... A stranger-than-fiction bildungsroman... This is a book of great compassion that traces the contours of a single remarkable life. But Bergner is also doing something more expansive, examining the long and tormented history of black involvement in an elite artistic tradition and in society at large. Ultimately, this is a story that captures that most inexplicable thing—the human will itself.”
—Thomas Chatterton Williams, New York Times Book Review

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“This book—how do I put this without sounding hyperbolic? This book should be read by every woman on earth. … It is a must-read for any person with even a remote erotic interest in the female gender. … It could single-spine-edly replace at least a quarter of the sexual self-help section and the world would be better for it. It is a revelation, a story of redemption. I laughed, I almost cried—with joy. I was turned on, even. You want a female Viagra? This book is as close as we have to it.”
Salon

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“Riveting ... Bergner's gift as a writer is his ability to combine the story-telling of a talented novelist with a journalist's skill at standing back and letting his subjects speak for themselves.”
New York Times Book Review

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“A rare book indeed. ... Bergner's journey is arduous, dangerous, and brave—a journey in which author and reader are irrevocably changed.”
Sunday Times of London

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“Chilling and heartbreaking ... a vivid, ambitious, and ferociously reported book that reads like a novel.”
New York Times Book Review

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