“A GRIPPING DESCRIPTION OF A JOURNEY TO HELL AND BACK, ONE THAT WILL TAKE ITS PLACE BESIDE WILLIAM STYRON’S ‘DARKNESS VISIBLE’ AND KAY REDFIELD JAMISON’S ‘AN UNQUIET MIND.’” —OLIVER SACKS “I glanced at myself in a mirror and, though unshaven, and my hair still morning-tousled, I appeared to be just the same. It was inside, inside my head, where all had become so wretchedly different. I had the night before been incontrovertibly a man of stable mood, of calm, of good cheer and unforced bonhomie. Now I had become changed, with dreadful suddenness, into another being altogether.”Simon Winchester has never shied away from big, even enormous, topics—as evidenced by his bestselling biography of the Atlantic Ocean, his account of the Krakatoa volcanic eruption, and his wildly popular “The Professor and the Madman,” about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. In his Byliner Original “The Man with the Electrified Brain,” he takes on arguably his most daunting subject yet: his own flirtation with madness, and one of nature’s greatest and most enduring mysteries, the human brain. As a geology student in his second year at Oxford, Winchester was known as a young man of even temper and keen intellect, until one June morning when he woke to find himself “changed with dreadful suddenness into another being altogether,” his normal life “slumped into chasm” and “folded in the dirt.” For a period of nine days, he lived in immobilizing fear. Everyday items—familiar paintings, a pile of books, his own robe hanging from a hook—became objects of horror; the world lost color, purpose, all sense and safety. When the episode finally passed, he returned to normal, presuming that what had happened to him was a fluke. It wasn’t. The episode repeated itself at unpredictable and dangerous intervals for four years—always lasting for nine days—and very nearly caused the author’s death while he was on an expedition in the Arctic. What was wrong with him? Where could he find help? Would he spend the rest of his life anticipating the return of these mental blackouts? With the urgency of a whodunit, Winchester describes the coming and going of these terrifying dissociative states and the chance encounter that led to the controversial treatment of electroconvulsive therapy, which may or may not have cured him once and for all. Written by a consummate storyteller, “The Man with the Electrified Brain” locates that finest of lines between sanity and insanity and is Winchester’s most riveting and deeply personal work yet.ABOUT THE AUTHORSimon Winchester, a former foreign correspondent for “The Guardian” and the London “Sunday Times,” has written twenty-five books of nonfiction, many of them international bestsellers, including “The Professor and the Madman,” “Krakatoa,” “The Map that Changed the World,” “The Man Who Loved China,” and “Atlantic.” “The Men Who United the States” is to be published in October. PRAISE FOR “THE MAN WITH THE ELECTRIFIED BRAIN”“A graceful, moving, and insightful account of a devastating condition which lies at the edge of our understanding of mental life.” —Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of “How the Mind Works”MORE PRAISE FOR SIMON WINCHESTER “However riotous British students may now be, Winchester is a perfect example of the value of a British education. He is learned, witty, his head stuffed to bursting with facts and curious lore, nothing fazes him, not storms, literary criticism, landscapes, seascapes, science or poetry, he can deal with it all. … A keen observer of things and people, albeit with a certain very English detachment, rather like that quality which made the travel books of so many other Oxonians—Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh come to mind—so very readable.” —Michael Korda, The Daily Beast