"For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Growing up in the Colombia of the 1980's and 1990's in a house where "what did you dream?" was asked in place of "how are you?" her world was laced with prophecy and violence. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with the ability to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. As a young girl, Rojas Contreras eavesdropped...

"The dramatic story of one man's recovery offers new hope to those suffering from concussions and other brain traumas. In 1999, Clark Elliott suffered a concussion when his car was rear-ended. Overnight his life changed from that of a rising professor with a research career in artificial intelligence to a humbled man struggling to get through a single day. At times he couldn't walk across a room, or even name his five children. Doctors told him he...

Describes how a former NFL player suffered permanent amnesia after a head injury--losing all of his memories of his past, his wife and children, and the imprint of a lifetime of learning--and describes how he reinvented himself with the help of his wife and family.

When Marcy Gregg awoke from a coma, 13 years had vanished from her memory. She was 30 years old; she thought she was still 17. She didn't recognize the man who introduced himself as her husband. She stared at pictures of the three children they said were hers, trying desperately to remember them, but her mind was blank. Terrified and confused, Marcy did the only thing she could think of: she faked it. She told the doctors she was starting to remember...

"In 2002, at age twenty-eight, David MacLean "woke up" in a foreign land with his memory wiped clean. No money. No passport. No identity. Taken to a mental hospital by the police, MacLean then started to hallucinate so severely he had to be tied down. Soon he could remember song lyrics and scenes from television shows, but not his family, his friends, or the woman he loved. All of these symptoms, it turned out, were the result of the commonly prescribed...

"Born in Louisiana to a soon-to-be absent father and an alcoholic mother--who tried to drown him in a bathtub when he was three--Clifton Crais spent his childhood perched beside his mother on a too-tall bar stool, living with relatives too old or infirmed to care for him, or rambling on his own through New Orleans, a city both haunted and created by memory. Indeed, it is memory--both elusive and essential--that forms the center of Crais's beautifully...