Beyond the High Blue Air

When Lu Spinney's twenty-nine-year-old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, “he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp,” writes his mother, “skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead...” He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma.

Thus begins the erratic loss-Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness-that unravels over the next five years. Spinne...