Treating the Brain: What the Best Doctors Know by Dr. Walter G. Bradley was a totally delightful book to read as I made my way on the bus from work to home.

I initially purchased this book as a hard cover from the Science Fiction Book Club then purchased the Kindle edition so I could both listen to music and read on Trinity, my iPhone 4.

First, let me talk about the book itself, then reluctantly discuss the Kindle edition.

This is a fantastic book. Dr. Bradley skillfully takes complex neurological subjects and distills them for both the knowledgeable and novice audience. He starts the book with basic brain anatomy and then segues into chapters on various neurological subjects such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Strokes and Migraines.

As a dedicated reader of medical history and narratives, I really enjoyed the case studies and Dr. Bradley’s personal insight into whatever disease he was discussing.

As with any book aimed at a more general public, the medical professional is not likely to gain much insight in the subject except when Dr. Bradley takes a more personal touch with the narrative. For me, this was a great mixture of the simple to complex and made neurology a very approachable subject.

This is a book that belongs on the shelf next to your collection of books authored by neurologists Dr. Oliver Saks and Dr. Harold Klawans.

Highly Recommended!

Now on to a subject which I find entirely distasteful and unfortunately, greatly diminished my enjoyment of this book: the Kindle formatting.

Whomever formatted the book for the Kindle should be shot stone cold dead.

There aren’t enough adjectives to describe how totally and utterly upset and disgusted I am with the publishers and the Kindle edition.

This book reminds me of the early days of desk top publishing wherein hardcopy publications were scanned by an OCR into a Word for Windows Document then converted to a pdf without any editing what so ever.

Too many times, Kindle edition would have run on words which boarded on the insane especially when dealing with technical terms forcing me to stop and decipher what was being conveyed.

Never mind the lack of a table of contents!

Dana Press (www.dana.org) published the hard cover and I have no idea who massacred the Kindle edition, but honestly Dana Press, please respect your author and redo the Kindle edition. Treating the Brain: What the Best Doctors Know is such a fantastic book that it deserves better than the shoddy treatment you gave the Kindle edition.

My score: 5 stars for the hardcover; 1 for the Kindle edition – but it’s such a great read, that even the slapdash Kindle edition won’t deter me from reading it again.

My next book (no hardcover just a Kindle edition) is The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

(Originally published on Live Journal: Serenade in Blue blog on 08 October 2011)