A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind [Hardcover]

Charles Fernyhough (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 2009

A father's intimate look at his daughter's developing mind from birth to age three.

Unlike any other time in our lives, we remember almost nothing from our first three years. As infants, not only are we like the proverbial blank slate, but our memories are like Teflon: nothing sticks. In this beautifully written memoir of his daughter's first three years, Charles Fernyhough combines his vivid observations with a synthesis of developmental theory, re-creating what that time, lost to the memory of adults, is like from a child's perspective.

In A Thousand Days of Wonder, Fernyhough, a psychologist and novelist, attempts to get inside his daughter Athena's head as she acquires all the faculties that make us human, including social skills, language, morality, and a sense of self. Written with a father's tenderness and a novelist's empathy and style, this unique book taps into a parent's wonder at the processes of psychological development.

Funny, touching, and fascinating, A Thousand Days of Wonder will reveal the extraordinary journey into personhood that children make during the momentous first three years of life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Many psychologists, most notably Jean Piaget, have used their offspring as test subjects, but none has done so with such sweetness as Fernyhough brings to his account of his daughter's development during the first three years of her life. From her initial appearance on a sonogram, we watch as baby Athena sorts out her sensory input, recognizes her quot;self,quot; learns that other people are more than extensions of her own will, and walks, talks, and remembers. All of this is basic developmental psych, readily available in many forms, including parenting manuals and textbooks. What makes this title outstanding is that it reads like fiction. (In addition to being a psychologist, the author is also a published novelist.) In vignettes about life with Athena, Fernyhough beautifully captures the mix of frustration and poignancy that will seem achingly familiar to all parents of toddlers. This beautiful book is highly recommended.
-Mary Ann Hughes, formerly Neill P.L., Pullman, WA

"An ambitious and highly intelligent piece of work. If the basis of love is attention, a quality of attention, then Fernyhough has written a 250-page love letter to his daughter. And any parent, particularly one with a young child, will be both moved and enlightened by it."
-Financial Times

"A cross between a biography of a baby growing into a child, a scientists's case-study notes and a beautifully written novel."
-The Guardian [from feature article]

"An elegantly written, warm, thoughtful, novelistic account of his first three years with his daughter Athena ... [does] a lovely job of conveying what life with a baby is like."
-Alison Gopnik, writing in The Times Literary Supplement

"A triumph of informed imagination and a startling testament of love."
-Sunday Telegraph

"Fernyhough has used his daughter's development as a hook on which to hang a considered, up-to-date summary of what we know about how babies develop. But The Baby in the Mirror is more than a high-concept popular science book with some family snaps thrown in.... When Fernyhough needs to sum up an idea about development quickly and accurately, he looks to his daughter, and where a lesser writer would have reached for generalisations, he simply tells us what he sees: the look of comic concentration with which Athena registers the effects of an action; the surreal cack-handedness of her first jokes."
-Sunday Telegraph

"A book that takes the reader right to the heart of how we become human and how we deal with it."
-The Scotsman<./I>

"But The Baby In The Mirror is also a memoir of sorts, a hymn to a child from a loving father. And that is how it reads."
-Sunday Herald

About the Author

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH studied developmental psychology at Cambridge University and is now a part-time lecturer in psychology at Durham University. He lives in County Durham, England, with his wife and two children. He is the author of the novel The Auctioneer and more than thirty research articles.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 14 and up
  
• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Avery; First Edition edition (April 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583333479
• ISBN-13: 978-1583333471
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #230,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charles Fernyhough is a writer and psychologist. He is the author of a novel, The Auctioneer (Fourth Estate), and has contributed short fiction to several anthologies, including New Writing 11 and New Writing 14. A Thousand Days of Wonder, a non-fiction book about the psychological development of his three-year-old daughter, is published by Avery. He is a part-time reader in psychology at Durham University, and contributes to the MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Further details are available at www.charlesfernyhough.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, June 6, 2009

By 

A. Luciano (Lowell, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind (Hardcover)

Charles Fernyhough, the author of this book, is a psychologist who is fascinated by the way the brains of young children develop. When his own wife becomes pregnant, he finds himself with the perfect test subject for all of his theories, and the perfect opportunity for close observation of an infant.

Fernyhough delves into the way the brain develops in the womb, the amazing way the mind forges connections even before birth. When his daughter, Athena, is actually born, her doting father spends a great deal of time observing and making notes about her behavior, a close study that continues up through her third year of life.

As a parent of small children myself, I found this account of developing brains to be both fascinating and familiar. It was interesting to find out that many of the emerging behaviors of my children were universal. I loved the way the author spoke to his daughter, and his adoration of her was clear from the way he wrote about their interactions.

This book occasionally got bogged down in the psychology lessons, though, going into some detail about why certain behaviors happened or how they happened, or how certain other scientists over time had observed similar behaviors. Much of this information I already knew, although I can't say for sure if I know it because it's basic information that everyone knows, or if I know it because I've specifically read about these studies before. I was much more interested in reading about the author's conversations with his little girl and how her personhood emerged.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An astonishing book, March 24, 2010

By 

E. Baber (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind (Hardcover)

(I read this as the new mother of a two-month old son, and I keep going back to it every couple of months as he changes with breathtaking rapidity....)

A seriously scientific book that repeatedly made me laugh out loud and choke back tears....what an accomplishment. Fernyhough edifies with well-annotated psychology, entertains with beautifully turned phrases, and moves by evoking his own somewhat melancholic spirit and his daughter's vast, inimitable personality. He really made me feel the enormity of a new human being's mind.

This book is great nourishment for the mind and soul of a new parent.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Little Science or Memoir to Satisfy, December 28, 2010

By 

In Search of Value (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind (Hardcover)

I bought this after hearing it mentioned on a Radio Lab episode thinking it would be an interesting read about infant brain development while I'm expecting our second child. The book is half memoir and half neuroscience but I found the book's split personality kept it from really being good at either attempt. The memoir sections read like forced and impersonal accounts included only to transition between scientific studies. The scientific studies are too often things that one would find in "What to Expect" which was not the level that I was expecting. Overall this book was neither a good memoir or a good neuroscience read, the latter being what I was really hoping for, and it left me very disappointed.