Eva Holland's debut, Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, begins with a dramatic scene: the author paralyzed near the end of an ice climbing outing, preferring to remain in place and freeze to death than to take the one step that would bring her to safety. It's a vivid opening to a fascinating book, one that combines self-help with self-examination as Holland investigates the subject of fear in the hope of overcoming her own.
Nerve traces Holland's attempt to understand and wrestle with three broad categories of fears: phobias (in her case, a fear of falling from an unprotected height), post-traumatic stress (the byproduct of four automobile accidents) and fear of death and loss, triggered by the sudden death of her 60-year-old mother following a stroke in July 2015.
Holland leads readers on some interesting excursions into current research on the sources of fear, along with some of its antidotes. But Holland's real goal is to bring science to bear in an effort to overcome her own terrors. A correspondent for Outside magazine, she lives in the town of Whitehorse, in Canada's Yukon Territory. She pursues an active life outdoors, where her acrophobia was often crippling. Much of the enjoyment of Nerve involves rooting for Holland as she attempts to wrestle her own fears to the ground, and to report on the outcome of that effort would spoil that pleasure. It's enough to say that by the end of this account, her relationship to fear has changed, something that may well happen to the readers of her engaging book. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer