Books
Crust
“Shainberg provokes us to ponder the relationship between our public and private selves... Crust never slows down. In between cringing and laughing, you're bound to feel a touch more enlightened about contemporary culture” — Time Out Chicago
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Published by Two Dollar Radio October, 2008
Walker Linchuk is an aged writer and author of the Complete Series (The Complete Book of Aids, 9/11, Terrorism) whose name has often been discussed as a strong possibility for the Nobel Prize, suffering from a seven month plague of writer’s block that New York Magazine says, “for candor and anguish, surpasses any we have on record.” One morning Linchuk wakes to find a crust in his nose - the “definitive crust of his life” - that awakens him to a new world of desire and enlightenment.
Extraction of this “breakthrough crust” leads to further secretion in the form of medical and scientific research into “the habit once called nose-picking,” Linchak’s The Complete Book of Nasalism, a memoir of his breakthrough, an endless succession of heated blog entries, and a flood of email exchanges with friends like George W. Bush, who is so moved by Linchak’s passion for the habit to confess his own on “Larry King Live.”
What ensues is equal parts George Orwell and Christopher Guest, an insightful and hilarious journey through our hyper-technological age.
» Read an excerpt
Ambivalent Zen : One Man’s Adventures on the Dharma Path
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Seeking help with his basketball game, Shainberg embraced Zen Buddhism in 1951 and was catapulted on a life-long spiritual journey. Alternately comic and reverential, Ambivalent Zen chronicles the rewards and dangers of spiritual ambition and presents a poignant reflection of the experiences faced by many Americans involved in the Zen movement.
Memories of Amnesia
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Brain surgeon Izzy Drogin experiences panic, misguided elation and immobility as he suffers symptoms of amnesia, epilepsy and other disorders in what PW termed a “grimly fascinating, frightening and painfully funny novel.”
Brain Surgeon: An Intimate View of His World
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Lawrence Shainberg spent a year with Dr. James Brockman, the world-famous neurosurgeon known simply as the Boss. The result is a remarkable and penetrating look inside both the private world of the brain surgeon and the shadowy regions of the brain.
An aneurysm ticks like a time bomb… a tumor consumes vital tissue…and the surgeon is confronted by the critical decision. He alone must lift his scalpel and attempt to save a life - and must life with himself and the consequences. Brain Surgeon captures the sardonic with, the massive egos, and the unsurpassed surgical skills that set this medical field apart from any other.
Brain Surgeon is a story of power and passion, pressure and pain. But most of all, it is the story of a paradox, of a doctor who can compare brain surgery to looking under the hood of a car and reflect on his proximity to one of the deepest mysteries of the human mind and soul.
One on One
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An introspective, 6’9” Jewish pro-basketball player and his first televised game at Madison Square Garden.