Psychiatrist Nora Volkow at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York pioneers brain imaging to investigate the effects of drug addiction on the brain.
She鈥檚 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鈥檚 non-fiction account of the gas attack on Tokyo鈥檚 subway in Underground (Harvill, 2001).
Other favourites are Benjamin鈥檚 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鈥檚 memoirs Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale, English translation coming in early 2004 from Knopf).
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On a lighter note, Volkow enjoyed reading about the relationship between owner and bird in The Parrot Who Owns Me by Joanna Burger (Random House, 2002).