Billy's Halo
  • Published: 31 July 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446436844
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368
Categories:

Billy's Halo

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A daughter's memoir of love, science and her father's death.

Science is just one way of looking at life. As a neuroscientist working at the forefront of medical research it is Ruth McKernan's way. When her father, Billy, succumbed to a mystery illness and slipped from consciousness into coma, Ruth watched his life ebb away with a mixture of love and terror. She struggled for control by using her scientific knowledge to analyse his medical condition.

In this moving account of her father's last year, love, grief and hope are intertwined with a crystal-clear scientific explanation of the way our brains and bodies work. The result is an inspired blend where the contrasting view of scientist and daughter ultimately unite.
  • Published: 31 July 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446436844
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368
Categories:

About the author

Ruth McKernan

Ruth McKernan is a Vice President of Drug Discovery for a multinational pharmaceutical company and a visiting professor at London's Institute of Psychiatry. She is an internationally recognized neuroscientist whose talent for making complex science interesting, entertaining and understandable earned her the Glaxo/ABSW Science Writers' Award for her articles in the Independent. Ruth lives with her husband and two children near Canterbury in Kent.

Praise for Billy's Halo

'An illuminating combination of medical science and personal feeling.

Professor Lewis Wolpert

'Billy's Halo charts the anatomy of love and loss, taking us back and forth from the solid science of body and brain to the shifting perspectives of personal experience. This is an original, enlightening and ultimately very moving book.'

Paul Broks, author of Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology

Part memoir, part popular science, Billy's Halo is an intriguing original venture. Ruth McKernan tells the story of her father's life and death, laced with her own emotional journey ... The excursions into science genuinely augment the story-line.

Independent

Eye-opening, poignant

Woman & Home

An intriguing mix of family memoir and medical fact...a brave undertaking, juxtaposing medical science - which, by its very natrue, is sterile and faceless - with that most personal of emotions, grief.

Glasgow Herald

A model of how to engage the public with science whilst providing insight into a professional scientist's life and work

T.W. Robbins, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Cambridge

Vivid and accessible writing about science is rare, so this moving and exhilarating account....is especially welcome ... Thanks to the humour and robustness of McKernan's writing, the book is enthralling and unsentimental.

Sunday Times
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