Beautifully written, honest, enlightening, hope-giving and valuable—essential for anyone interested in or struggling with...
With illuminating clarity, a psychotherapist describes how he suffered a paranoid psychotic mental breakdown as a young man and how he recovered.
In 1979, when Guppy was 23, he returned home to Seattle from a trip to Mexico and went insane. Suddenly, his perceptions underwent terrifying alterations. His family seemed demonic, and the most ordinary things were menacing: A Dire Straits song’s “crackling blue guitar solo cuts through my brain like a wire egg slicer.” At the hospital, he was diagnosed (he discovered later) as suffering psychotic depression with paranoid features. After six months of inpatient treatment, medications and therapies, Joe was ready to move out to a group home and, finally, to take up normal life. In his debut work, Guppy, now a psychotherapist in private practice, writes with astonishing clarity about his mental processes and the perceptual shifts involved both in going mad and in getting better. In paranoia, the misplaced significance that can fester is oddly similar to religious thinking: “God speaks in mysterious ways, in signs to be read by those with eyes to see”—signs like the doorknobs being too high or a staircase taking an extra turn. Guppy is particularly insightful in showing how paranoid delusions can be hard to give up, as when he asks himself whom he’d rather interact with: “An overburdened nurse, annoyed and bored [or a] wily demon?...To the nurse I am one more warehoused loser. To the demon I am a special person, deserving special treatment.” As he progresses, Guppy is able to develop a more nurturing spirituality than the terrifying, punitive Catholicism of his childhood, especially after some deeply touching moments of feeling close to and loved by God. He learns that he can control his thoughts, reactions and interpretations and convincingly shows the limitations of one-size-fits-all therapeutic approaches versus the growth and healing to be found in talk therapy and by connecting with other patients.
Beautifully written, honest, enlightening, hope-giving and valuable—essential for anyone interested in or struggling with mental health issues.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1620154410
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Booktrope Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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