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The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction and a Search for Relief: Chronic Head Pain, the Mystery of Its Origins, and the Search for Effective Relief
by Tom Zeller Jr.
For the many millions of headache sufferers, a deeply reported, sometimes harrowing, and frequently humorous journey into the author's own excruciating headaches, and the science behind these surprisingly mysterious disorders that may, finally, offer relief.
Virtually everyone has experienced a headache—a nuisance arising from occasional stress or as payback for last night's overindulgence. But for hundreds of millions of people, there are headaches, and then there are headaches. From blinding migraines to severe headache disorders known as "clusters," chronic head pain can upend entire seasons of life. And perhaps owing to the ordinariness of the very word "headache," these disorders are frequently trivialized.
In The Headache, veteran science journalist Tom Zeller Jr. takes readers on an odyssey both intimate and panoramic, through his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches and across the scientific landscape of a group of disorders that is—to the chagrin of sufferers—as much a curse as a cultural punchline. He visits cutting-edge clinics; interviews dozens of doctors, neurologists, and fellow headache patients; participates in clinical trials for multi-million-dollar new medicines; and even experiments with psilocybin in search of relief. Along the way, Zeller traces the longer arc of mystery around headaches, from prehistoric skull surgery to Virginia Woolf's assertion that, in the throes of a migraine, "language runs dry," to reveal how headaches became one of the most under-researched afflictions in medicine—and how that is slowly starting to change.
With warmth, wit, and infectious curiosity, Zeller's search for the origins of his own headaches becomes a journey into the inner workings of the human nervous system, and an illuminating look at the nature of pain itself.
"Moving...an eye-opening study of an all-too-common affliction." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A sharp—and funny—account of one man's attempt to understand why so many of us suffer head pain." —Kirkus Reviews
"The Headache is smart, insightful, funny, compassionate, addictively readable, and most of all necessary. It's about time—and every sufferer out there will agree—that we try to make sense of headaches, one of medicine's longstanding great mysteries. Tom Zeller Jr.'s book is a pioneering illumination of both the subject and the many people it touches, offering understanding tinged with hope." —Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Poisoner's Handbook
"An important, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful book. If the path to enlightenment is to make the darkness conscious, as Carl Jung taught, then Tom Zeller Jr. is showing us the way by illuminating his own pain and those of countless others suffering from devastating headaches. The science here is skillfully explained, of course, but that's only the most obvious of this book's many virtues." —Dan Fagin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Toms River
This information about The Headache was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tom Zeller Jr. is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Undark, a nonprofit digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society. Previously, he was a reporter and columnist at the New York Times, an editor at large for National Geographic magazine, and a Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He lives in Lolo, Montana. The Headache is his first book.
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