The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Like Cajal's drawings, this book provides a balance between beautiful images and information. The images, many of which have not been previously shown or reproduced, are truly the work of a master artist and scientist. The essays accompanying the book provide context for the scope of Cajal's work and allow the readers a glimpse into the personal life of Santiago Roman y Cajal.

I'm a Neuroscientist, so I'm a huge fan of Santiago Ramon y Cajal and have spent hours in lectures hearing about his incredible work. This is a fantastic piece of art and makes an excellent coffee table book for our nerdy home! It is really interesting and informative, not to mention beautiful. The size of the book makes it an excellent accent piece! If someone in your life is studying Neuro, buy them this book!! It would make an incredible gift.

review written by David A BronczykI've been an ardent admirer of Ramon y Cajal's work for many years, and I find myself saddened by his obscurity and underappreciated accomplishments. He single-handedly revolutionized our understanding of the central nervous system, working only with primitive equipment and his own staggering drawing skills a full century in advance of the development of fMRI scanners, scanning electron microscopes, and EEG spectrograms. This wonderful book puts Ramon y Cajal's life work in artful perspective; the biographical sketches and photographs at the beginning of the book provide an intimate view of the man, and the drawings ... well, they speak for themselves! Ramon y Cajal correctly derived the flow of neural-signalling traffic in the brain by studying the structure of neurons -- and he artfully indicted this flow with arrows! -- and many of his findings have only recently been confirmed by brain science. The man was a prescient genius. And, I very highly recommend this beautifully designed and printed book!

Fabulous book. The quality of the reproductions are beautiful, and the commentary by Newman and others is articulate, and insightfully. A great gift for artists and scientists.

My wife works in the neuroscience field. (She is also from Spain!) She was so impressed by this book that she bought copies for all of her co-workers. A beautifully organized and aesthetically pleasing tribute to a revolutionary scientist.