First published in 1986. This study contains an examination of Alexander Luria's translated research of over half a century on language and human psychological processes. Alexander Romanovich Luria began his career prior to the Russian Revolution, while still an enthusiastic teenager, imbued with the ideals of Russian activist humanism and burning with a desire to apply science to the improvement of his countrymen. He died a world famous professor in his country's most prestigious university more than half a century later. His published works have the subject matter included experimental studies of the relation between cognition and affect, the impact of cultural and social conditions on cognitive development, the role of genetic influences in development, mental retardation, aphasia, the restoration of function following brain lesions, and the psychophysiology of mind. More important than the variety of his efforts was their unity; the scientific goals he set himself as a young man remained those he was pursuing when he died.

First published in 1986. This study contains an examination of Alexander Luria's translated research of over half a century on language and human psychological processes. Alexander Romanovich Luria began his career prior to the Russian Revolution, while still an enthusiastic teenager, imbued with the ideals of Russian activist humanism and burning with a desire to apply science to the improvement of his countrymen. He died a world famous professor in his country's most prestigious university more than half a century later. His published works have the subject matter included experimental studies of the relation between cognition and affect, the impact of cultural and social conditions on cognitive development, the role of genetic influences in development, mental retardation, aphasia, the restoration of function following brain lesions, and the psychophysiology of mind. More important than the variety of his efforts was their unity; the scientific goals he set himself as a young man remained those he was pursuing when he died.

Luria presents a compelling portrait of a man’s heroic struggle to regain his mental faculties. A soldier named Zasetsky, wounded in the head at the battle of Smolensk in 1943, found himself unable to recall his recent past or speak, read, or write without difficulty. Woven throughout his first-person account are interpolations by Luria himself.

A welcome re-issue of an English translation of Alexander Luria's famous case-history of hypermnestic man. The study remains the classic paradigm of what Luria called 'romantic science,' a genre characterized by individual portraiture based on an assessment of operative psychological processes. The opening section analyses in some detail the subject's extraordinary capacity for recall and demonstrates the association between the persistence of iconic memory and a highly developed synaesthesia. The remainder of the book deals with the subject's construction of the world, his mental strengths and weaknesses, his control of behaviour and his personality. The result is a contribution to literature as well as to science. (Psychological Medicine ).

The field of cultural-historical psychology originated in the work of Lev Vygotsky and the Vygotsky Circle in the Soviet Union more than eighty years ago, and has now established a powerful research tradition in Russia and the West. The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology is the first volume to systematically present cultural-historical psychology as an integrative/holistic developmental science of mind, brain, and culture. Its main focus is the inseparable unity of the historically evolving human mind, brain, and culture, and the ways to understand it. The contributors are major international experts in the field, and include authors of major works on Lev Vygotsky, direct collaborators and associates of Alexander Luria, and renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks. The Handbook will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of psychology, education, humanities and neuroscience.