Editor's Note: This is a very unusual event for us. We have not previously published an excerpt from an autobiography. Despite my own personal 21 years of experience researching and working with patients with cochlear implants, as I read the book, I was pulled into the story. The intelligent, "friendly-yet-sometimes-explicit" authoritative writing style of Michael Chorost is fascinating. Michael's ability to relate his cochlear implant experience to other topical events and issues highly relevant to life in 2005, is nothing less than captivating. Some of the words are indeed "R-rated" and arguably one should be careful if giving this book to children! Nonetheless, this is the most interesting and entertaining book I have read regarding the cochlear implant experience. I highly recommend this book and I am honored to present Chapter One to the readers of www.healthyhearing.com
---Dr. Douglas L. Beck, Audiologist and Editor-In-Chief
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Houghton Mifflin, June 2, 2005
Available at Amazon.com, BN.com, and anywhere books are sold.
My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas. I must live almost alone, like one who has been banished. I can mix with society only as much as true necessity demands. If I approach near to people a hot terror seizes upon me, and I fear being exposed to the danger that my condition might be noticed.iv
"No refined conversations," indeed. I had loved to listen to my massage therapist's gentle voice as her hands worked my shoulders and arms. Now that I am completely deaf I just have to lie there, wandering in the dullness of my ingrown mind, while her hands probe my skin. When I am face up things are easier, though being prone, without my glasses, in low light, is not the best conversational situation. The results are atrocious:
"So what have you done this week, Wendy?"
"Mnnn gnorm erumm brmm parumm gerumm."
I crane my head up to look at her. I do my best to repeat what I think I have heard back to her, to save her the trouble of saying it over again. "Sandwich?" I realize as I say it that it is a ridiculous guess.
"Mnnn gnorm erumm brmmm party gerumm."
"Party. You had a party?"
"Yes. For Aiyana."
I know that Aiyana is one of the associates of the clinic. At least now I'm contextualized. I can decode better.
"A big party?"
"Serrum gvrmmm."
"Small party?"
"Sixteen. It was just enough."
"Sixteen people. That's a lot for a small space like this." Absurdly, I am assuming she had the party in the office.
"No, at home."
"Ah, at home." I let my head drop back on the table. "I'm sorry I missed it."
It is like returning to the ancient days of 300-baud modems, when one could see text appearing on the screen letter by letter. We communicate phoneme by phoneme, with tin cans and string.
And there are many other little humiliations. I forget to take my change at the supermarket and the bagger runs after me in the parking lot, calling, but I don't turn around until he taps my shoulder. In doctors' offices, I have to apologetically ask receptionists to come and get me when I am called. I don't dare to start conversations with people I don't know.
I'm still able to get things done at work, since most of my job consists of writing anyway. But when I try to attend a meeting with two other people, I can't swivel my head back and forth fast enough to follow what either of them are saying. At first they gamely try to include me, but it's hopelessly tedious and soon they return to doing what they know how to do, which is talk like normal people. They aren't being unkind; they just don't know what more they can do, and neither do I. For about ten minutes I watch them, feeling like HAL, the hyperintelligent computer in Kubrick's 2001, spying on two astronauts by lipreading their conversation through a spacepod's window. Maybe HAL could do such a thing, but I can't. I see their lips move, I know megabytes of information are flowing back and forth, but it's as invisible to me as radio waves. Finally I quietly excuse myself and they nod me out.
I relinquish my lead responsibilities in the Tahoe contract, turn it over to my supervisor, move to a secondary job devising the survey instruments and doing the background research. It would have been so much fun to barnstorm Tahoe, interviewing anyone who would stand still long enough. That's all impossible now.
Using the telephone is out of the question. And this is the worst limitation of all, because it contracts my social universe into my line of sight. The phone used to be a gateway onto an unseen world of distant family and friends. I can still pick up the handset and put it to my ear, but nothing happens when I do. I can't even hear the dial tone
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But, grotesquely, I am not living in the silent world that I might have expected. That would at least have been familiar, for I had always been able to take my hearing aids out and experience near-total silence. Now, I am living in an endless cacophony. Now I hear a thunderous river, now a jet engine, now a restaurant with a thousand patrons all talking at once. The sound is unending and overwhelming. Silence is the one thing I never have.
No one can really explain to me what is causing the "noise". One theory is that in the total absence of sound, the auditory cortex hallucinates in an attempt to make up for the deficit. Amputees have phantom limb; perhaps I have phantom ear. Another theory is that it is the auditory equivalent of chronic pain, where my damaged cochlea is wildly firing nerve impulses unrelated to sensory stimuli. For hours on end I hear bing-bing-bing sounds like the bells at railroad crossings. I can hardly help but interpret it as my ear crying alarm! alarm! alarm! alarm!
But there are consolations. In the evenings the rumbles and bells soften. They become grand, sonorous, and deep. I hear a vast organ playing a slowly evolving dirge without a time or a beat. It has the solemn grandeur of an aurora. Occasionally it rises to sustained pitches, like the voiceless wail of Gyorgi Ligeti's Atmospheres when the planets come into alignment in 2001. It fits the occasion, for in 2001 my ears are dying. But they are playing superbly at their own funeral.
It's not only my body and world I can't recognize. I can't even recognize myself. Two days after I returned from Tahoe, a neurotologist wrote me a prescription for an even larger dose of steroids and told me solemnly, "Don't make any major life decisions while you're taking this stuff."
I quickly found out why. Each dose is like chugging a full thermos of coffee. My heart races. I start nervously rubbing the back of my neck throughout the day. I pace around in tight little circles while waiting for things to come out of the office printer. My muscles start to feel tight and dense, and I begin compulsively flexing my biceps, not because I want to build them up, but because they just want to move, dammit.
But most of all, I've become some creature I can't recognize. I'm sobbing in my car, sobbing in locked bathrooms, sobbing on my couch at home. To be sure, anyone would grieve for their lost ears and fear an uncertain future, but these feelings are like a jagged slash torn in the beige fabric of my life. Normally I am formal, correct, restrained, the wryly funny analytic type. But the steroids have wrenched me as open as a conch shell.
In Carlos Castaneda's books, don Juan speaks of drugs as teachers: peyote is a guardian and an advisor, and mescaline is the gateway to the other world. Steroids, too, are a teacher. They teach me how to grieve, how to cry, at a time when grief and tears are what I need. Under their brutal influence I begin to write, seizing the opportunity to speak with a raw frankness about my life, my fears, my hearing, and what is about to happen to me. I'm completely deaf, I'm in an eternal cacophony, I'm sobbing every hour on the hour, and I'm pouring out words.
In the Divine Comedy Dante speaks of times where "the veil grows thin," where it becomes easy for the traveler to cross the barriers between the earthly and the divine, the seen and the unseen. This is such a time. I am a wreck, but a potently reconstructible one. All that sobbing has made my face transparent. The shock of total deafness and impending reconstruction has unmoored me from my familiar attitudes and assumptions, breaking me down to first principles, leaving me like a stem cell, embryonic, totipotent. I am emotionally raw, tender with grief and fear, but perceiving the world with such clarity and precision that my former self now seemed blind and mundane. The drugs teach me what it is like to be new. It is as if the universe is whispering into my now-deaf ear, "Now. Now is your chance. You have been torn down in body and soul. Go through the change and come out new. Rebuild."
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If I want to hear clocks ticking again, people's voices, a lover's murmur, I will have to go through the change. But the prospect evokes a primitive terror. Before I got my hearing aids I was a mute, fearful little savage, taking in the few words I could grasp with utter literalness. In preschool I was informed that I would become a bird. I took this to mean that I would be changed into an eerie new shape: wings. beak. eye. The prospect of this eldritch transformation so terrified me that I came home crying and screaming. Much later I would realize that it was just a metaphor labeling the kids on the first and second floors (the kids upstairs were the "Birds", those downstairs the "Bears.") But the shaping terrors of childhood never really depart, they only mature into more sophisticated forms. I was going to become a cyborg: silicon. electrodes. code.
As a child I had watched wide-eyed as Don Knotts fell into the sea in The Incredible Mr. Limpet and was transformed, in a series of apparently agonizing stages, into a fish. Could such things really happen? I wasn't quite sure, but when adults offered to turn me into a bird, the prospect chilled me to the bone. Now I dreamed of computer chips lancing into my head and woke to the realization that the dream was a prediction. The sheer psychic shock of that. The chaos it evoked in the orderly bookshelves of my life.
While the computer would not change me beyond all recognition, it would nevertheless be woven into my body in ways that anyone would find unnerving. There would be a post-surgical scar, which although eventually hidden by regrown hair would be none the less present to my appalled gaze the day after surgery. There would be a tactile bump on my skull a millimeter or two high, obvious to my own fingers and that of a lover's. Most of all, there would be the interface the plastic thing that would stick onto my skull. It would suck itself into place with startling soft firmness, an electromagnetic soul kiss to start the day, and cling there like a remora, odd and obscurely frightening to strangers. Transmitting data generated by complex algorithms with strange acronyms SPEAK, ACE, CIS, SAS. (Put in that order, they sounded like a strangely intimate telegram from an emotionless intelligence.) The somberly impressive cost: fifty thousand dollars.
And the utter strangeness of the journey. The ritual scarification of surgery, the thirty-day silent period between surgery and activation to let the incision heal, and the crossing into a domain of experience that few people could ever know. Mysterious devices sticking inside and out my body, crunching numbers like mad. A cyborg. The real thing. Not science fiction. Me.
I have long lived a life surrounded by computers, from the TI-83 I had in high school to the successions of computers on my desktop. Now the computer will go inside my body, literally woven into my flesh, in my head. Running do-loops in a language compiled from C, updating an array of internal variables 32 million times a second. I lock myself in my office and cry as I think of getting a little plastic model of my inner ear and symbolically burying it in my garden. Saying goodbye to the organic ear I used to have, and preparing for its terrifyingly rational reconstruction.
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I would not have been so frightened a decade earlier. I used to be uncritically, eagerly in love with computers. In seventh grade my parents bought me a programmable TI calculator and I spent hours devising programs that would make it play blackjack and tic-tac-toe. Over the years I owned a succession of computers and learned four programming languages. I did my master's in Shakespearean drama because I loved words as well as code, but computers let me build beautiful machines out of ideas, castles in the air held up on delicate struts of logic. For my dissertation I wrote twenty thousand lines of code to create a Web-based program that let students in my literature and composition classes work on projects together outside of the classroom. It worked. It won awards. It got me my Ph.D.
Computers were an elegant, productive addiction and like all addicts, I began to realize that I was paying a terrible price. In the end, after all those hours at the keyboard, I was still a man sitting alone in a room staring at a computer screen. I had no girlfriend, no family of my own, not even enduringly close friendships apart from the ones I had already developed in high school and college.
My addiction came at least partly from having poor hearing. I was agonizingly slow to acquire the social graces while growing up. Social norms are not taught, they are overheard, but the one thing even the most skilled deaf people cannot do is overhear.
I did not know until high school that people went to parties on the weekends. Community? Intimacy? Like car accidents, they only happened to other people. In my freshman year of college I was so desperate to meet women that in my first month I knocked on every single door of the dorm and introduced myself, a memory that still makes me cringe twenty years later. Day after day, I ate alone in the cafeteria at Brown. I had friends, yes, good ones, but just a few, not enough to book all those lunches and dinners. I longed to have a body that didn't need to eat. It was not until I was 25 that I had my first girlfriend, and even after that, relationships were few and far between. I was an unbearable teenage nerd, fascinated by computers, miserable with desire, and wholly in love with the idea of the machine. The computer offered me escape and respite, the feeling of control and power.
Computers could connect people, I had argued in my dissertation, and so they could if their use was embedded in a context that was already social and personal, such as the classroom. But absent that, they were machines whose main outputs were logic and loneliness. For me the proof was that my persistent efforts at online dating had met with virtually complete failure: there was no social context in which I could be judged as a human being. Most online dating sites ask one to specify one's height and the height of one's ideal mate. They also and here is the rub enable one to search for people who are only above a given height. I am five-foot-four in my shoes, and it depresses me no end that most women specify, in their profiles, that they want a mate between five-ten and six-two. eHarmony is positively tyrannical about it, matching men only with shorter women. As far as the computer is concerned, I am not five-four; I am invisible. The computer utterly rationalizes dating by enabling people to search for potential mates by numerical specifications, eliminating the goofy serendipity of life in a human context.
Because computers are the ultimate expression of abstract logic, they invite the creation of systems which are only about logic. That level of abstraction enables programmers to disregard utterly the world of human feelings and needs. All that matters is the abstract beauty of the machine. The tragedy is that the problems which cannot be precisely characterized and neatly solved happen to be the most important ones: communication, understanding, collaboration, negotiation. Love.
As I entered the second half of my thirties I began to feel, as Dante had, that I had lost the path of my life indeed, that I had never found the path to begin with. I had several close friends scattered around the country, but no one I could just call up and go out for coffee with. I depended on no one, but then again, no one depended on me. Most painfully of all, I found establishing relationships with women nearly impossible. It took me longer to go from puberty to my first relationship (1976-1989) than it took the entire United States Government to design and land a spacecraft on the moon (1961-1969). Again and again I made overtures and was rejected. I had always been sort of: sort of hearing, sort of socially aware, and as one dating prospect ambiguously said to me, sort of adorable. I felt, as a result, sort of human.
Even as I put the finishing touches on my dissertation, then, I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with computers. They certainly had not met my most poignant needs. I frequently reread Frank Herbert's Dune trilogy, which is set in a future that has outlawed computers. It doesn't object to technology in general: it embraces spaceships, weaponry, chemistry, heavy machinery of all kinds. But computers were long ago outlawed during its "Butlerian Jihad," a religious movement that defined the automation of thought as profane. Its battle cry was "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind."v But the need to handle information did not go away, so in computers' place are mentats, human beings trained to achieve prodigous powers of memorization and data analysis.
Dune's universe focuses on developing human rather than machine powers. Its characters are intensely alive, bursting with inner monologues and ambitions and relationships. Not that I would necessarily want to live in Dune's universe: it's also feudal, violent, autocratic, and totally lacking in what we would call civil liberties. But the gains and the losses apparently couldn't be separated. Take computers away, Herbert seemed to be saying, and what you lost in rationality and orderliness you gained in a human capacity to enter into true relationships with the self and the world. You can have one kind of civilization or the other, Dune implied, but not both.
That was why I both loved and hated computers. I loved their pleasures and seductions and conveniences. I hated the hyperrational, lonely society that their remorseless logic had let human beings so easily create.
And then in Becky's office I was staring at a computer in my palm that was going to go inside me. My very body would have technical specifications. Programming language, C. Number of auditory channels, eight. Electrode array refresh rate, either analog or 833 cycles per second, depending on the software. Number of transistors, 140,000. Data transfer rate through the skin, 1.1 million bits per second. Processor speed, 32 million cycles per second.vi Now the computer would have a hold on me that I would never, ever be able to escape.
I would have to become a cyborg that was deeply suspicious of computers. If I ever chose to embark on a Butlerian Jihad, my first logical target would have to be myself.
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The medical system gathers me up into its routine of tests. One of my first stops is the MRI machine, which will peer deep into my skull to see whether surgery is feasible. It's hulking, huge, enormous, a cylindrical superconducting magnet so powerful that it can yank unchained oxygen tanks into its maw from across the room. I am deprived of every piece of metal on my body plus, of course, my wallet with all of its magnetically encoded credit cards. Then I am slid tenderly into the machine's narrow birth canal. The computer may get inside me eventually, but today I am getting inside it.
I lie very still, per instructions. I cannot help eyeballing what little I can see: the off-white curve of the chamber, blankly emitting the confining grandeur of Washington Metro stations; the metal array encircling my head to focus the magnetic field lines; and nothing else whatsoever. I catch myself thinking it would be a nice idea to position a small TV above the patient's head, to fill the lonely forty-five minutes. But it would certainly be destroyed by the magnetic field. Machines can't survive in here. Once I had the implant embedded in my head, I would not be allowed in or even near this room again. In fact, above the MRI's underground chamber is a small outdoor garden whose perimeter is ringed with signs reading sternly, Persons with pacemakers, neurostimulators, or metallic implants must not enter the landscaped area. 21st-century cherubim and seraphim, banishing me from the Eden of the innocently organic.
The machine grinds, clicks, and hums around me. To my surprise, I feel an artless joy. This is just where I love to be, deep inside elegant machines doing mysterious invisible things at high speed. I am eerily aware that right now the computer is probing my head with magnetic fields, executing tens of thousands of lines of code, assembling megabytes of data which will lay bare the inmost contours of my ear. Words like sagittal, transverse, and spline drift through my mind, although I am only vaguely aware of what they mean. The poetry of technology. Somewhere out of sight, megabytes of data purl onto a server's hard disk.
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How was I going to go through the change? As a lifelong reader of literature, I already had some answers at hand. A mind richly stocked with stories can select from them as needed, applying narrative to the chaos of experience in order to move ahead with greater sureness to an imagined resolution. When I failed an important exam in grad school, I thought of Odysseus clinging to the fragments of his wrecked ship at sea, and remembered that he had still managed to get home to Ithaca. The myth gave me heart and hope.
Now I needed a story not of survival, but of transformation. Pinnochio? Well, not really. Pinnochio was turned into a real live boy as a reward for virtue, and it was done for him. Steve Austin? Possibly. But the Steve Austin of the TV show was problematic. To be sure, I had been fascinated by The Six Million Dollar Man when it ran in the 1970s. But Steve Austin was a Hollywood cyborg, steely, impassive, and impervious to pain. The nerd in me had loved that image. And yet I could not help feeling skeptical, even then, of the implication that having bionic limbs and organs also entailed having a mechanical soul. Hollywood's depiction of the cyborg seemed like a cheat, a poor bargain: to become more than human, you also had to become less than human. You had to give up your soul to the machine.
But Martin Caidin's novel Cyborg, the inspiration for the TV show, had given me an entirely different perspective on Steve Austin. The book version of Steve Austin was resentful, disciplined, and ambitious, a flawed human being who lashed out at his own doctors and engineers yet also collaborated with them in the project of rebuilding himself. More than anything else, Caidin's novel is about Austin's painful transformation and his gradual acceptance of his new body. Acting as Virgil to his Dante is Rudy Wells, his flight surgeon, who guides him with endless patience. At one point Austin is furious because he continues to fall while running and Wells says to him,
"You are a clumsy kid. Can't you understand that? Biologically, that happens to be the fact. Oh, for God's sake, Steve, you know the score. Physiologically, much of your body is that of an adult child. Your system is learning things all over again at superspeed. But it's still confused. The problem isn't in the bionics limbs. It's in your own nerve network."
Hollywood cyborgs are often ungainly, but they are not clumsy. Clumsiness is a purely human trait. And Steve Austin has a very human reaction to Wells' attempts to explain his own body to him:
Steve looked at him. "Are you patronizing me, Doc?"
"No, you son of a bitch, I am not."
"Well, you damn well are acting like it!" In a sudden burst of rage he swept the table clean of all objects; ash trays, manuals, coffee cups went crashing to the floor.vii
It was Caidin's story of struggle and transformation, rather than the ones offered by Hollywood, that served me best twenty-five years later. For me Cyborg became a map of the unlighted journey I was about to traverse. Like Steve Austin's, my body would have to build up its own "memory banks" of the new "data feeds" (and they would literally be data feeds.) I would become an adult child, learning how to hear all over again at superspeed, compressing into days and weeks what takes an infant years.
But I did not yet understand, going in, why Steve Austin was so angry. To be sure, surgery and transformation is a difficult experience, but where did the rage come from? Shouldn't he be excited? Grateful? Eager to learn and improve? But I would come to understand. Oh, boy, would I be angry. Would I ever.
Yet that was part of the transformation. In acquiring the body of my teenage dreams, I would have the chance to become the adult I wanted to be. To cast off, in my long agon with the machine, the longstanding frustrations left over from an unfinished adolescence. To reject the worthless bargain offered by Hollywood, and negotiate a better one. To become a cyborg. In real life. On my own terms, in my own way.
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i "The word is shorthand for cybernetic organism, a term coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline": The definition of the word in their article "Cyborgs and Space" was rather more technical than WordNet's. "What are some of the devices necessary for creating self-regulating man-machine systems? This self-regulation must function without the benefit of consciousness in order to cooperate with the body's own autonomous homeostatic controls. For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term Cyborg.' The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments" (p. 30-31).
"To see is to observe, but to hear is to be enveloped": Hull, Touching the Rock, p. 83.
iii "They feel that it is they who have become unreal, not the world": In her memoir of getting a cochlear implant Beverly Biderman writes, "Our environment has become dead, and we may also feel to some extent that we too have become dead. With my implant turned off, I feel like I am soundlessly walking down stairs and passing through rooms like a ghost." Biderman, Wired for Sound, p. 65.
iv "My misfortune is doubly painful to me": Beethoven, The Heiligenstadt Testament, online.
v "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind": Herbert, Frank. Dune, p. 23.
vi "My very body would have technical specifications": These figures were provided to me by Mike Faltys and Logan Palmer of Advanced Bionics.
vii "You are a clumsy kid" and "Steve looked at him": Caidin, Cyborg, pages 149 and 150.
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About Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human
Michael Chorost became a cyborg on October 1, 2001, the day his new ear was booted up. Born hard of hearing in 1964, he went completely deaf in his thirties. Rather than live in silence, he chose to have a computer surgically embedded in his skull to artificially restore his hearing.
This is the story of Chorost"s journey -- from deafness to hearing, from human to cyborg -- and how it transformed him. The melding of silicon and flesh has long been the stuff of science fiction. But as Chorost reveals in this witty, poignant, and illuminating memoir, fantasy is now giving way to reality.
Chorost found his new body mystifyingly mechanical: kitchen magnets stuck to his head, and he could plug himself directly into a CD player. His hearing was routinely upgraded with new software. All this forced him to confront complex questions about humans in the machine age: When the senses become programmable, can we trust what they tell us about the world? Will cochlear implants destroy the signing deaf community? And above all, are cyborgs still human?
A brilliant dispatch from the technological frontier, Rebuilt is also an ode to sound. Whether Chorost is adjusting his software in a desperate attempt to make the world sound "right" again, exploring the neurobiology of the ear, or reflecting on the simple pleasure of his mother"s voice, he invites us to think about what we hear -- and how we experience the world -- in an altogether new way.
Brimming with insight and written with dry, self-deprecating humor, this quirky coming-of-age story unveils, in a way no other book has, the magnificent possibilities of a new technological era.
Advance Praise for Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human
"A deeply enjoyable book. Chorost ponders what is real' to us in our natural state and what our natural' state really is, and how what is real to us will change over time, and thus change us. Chorost is at the vanguard of where most baby-boomers will end uppart human and part machine." Rodney Brooks, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and author of Flesh and Machines
"Chorost takes us on an amazing intellectual journey as he moves from deafness to computer-assisted hearing. He asks big questions about the nature of reality, the meaning of being human, and how much we can bear to be improved.' Chorost has a fine ear for language, and writes with intelligence, wit, and not a little bit of what he calls rueful irony.' A lovely book." Robin Marantz Henig, author of Pandora's Baby and The Monk in the Garden
"Chorost is a quite amazing new writer whose prose spirits the reader across the sound barrier from deafness to a new world in which an essential human function is replaced by a tiny computer chip. In Rebuilt, he introduces us to the startling brave new world of bionic replacement parts with himself as the patient, explorer, cyborg, and a more fully human being." Sol Stein, author of Stein on Writing and (with James Baldwin) Native Sons
"Rebuilt is a heartfelt exploration of technologically mediated perception and the impact of a cochlear implant on one man's experience and sense of self. Chorost's journey is that of humanity itself." Andy Clark, author of Natural-Born Cyborgs
"An exemplary first-person account of becoming a cyborg. Rebuilt combines technical and philosophical erudition with fine writing." Chris Hables Gray, author of Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age and editor of The Cyborg Handbook
"Chorost has written a wonderfully fascinating account of banishing total deafness. His experience is a harbinger of the future. Beethoven would be encouraged." Manfred Clynes, coiner of the term "cyborg" and Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University
"This is a terrific bookan eyewitness bulletin from the borderlands where technology and bodies clash and meld. I read it through in one huge chomp, shouting and chortling at this adventure or that. Chorost pulls off the high-wire stunt of conveying scientific accuracy about a complex biomedical topic while writing with the cliffhanger excitement of an action adventure videogame." Allucqure Rosanne Stone, author of The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age
For more information, visit www.rebuilt-thebook.com.
