It’s no easy thing to provide a glimpse into the churning melancholia of bipolar lows, but Simon manages it—with...
A cross-country road trip—mostly lucid, sometimes scary: the bipolar Simon interviews other bipolar people who have been successfully treated and now lead highly functional lives, while she regularly gets pounded by her own disorder.
She opens with a guided tour into her mental illness, telling how in high school she became jittery, then confused, layering anxieties upon anxieties, finding it increasingly difficult to speak or stop the tears, moving toward a paranoia that convinced her the CIA was out to kidnap her cat. The tour is impressive—with its darting sentences, stops and starts, gasped breaths—for the way it conveys the smothering, agitated brain fever Simon was feeling. She gets help, is given medication to bring the chemistry into a semblance of balance, and it isn’t long before she formulates the idea of a road trip to find her herd of people: bipolars who have laid siege to their disorder. She swings low out of New York and west across the southern tier, talking to others about the circumstances of their disorder, what went right for them, what things they did that gave them a leg up. This is no easy road; Simon knows, as do her interviewees, that one’s mercurial nature can leak through the medication, and she knows the fear that comes with hearing the biochemical and psychological cues that that’s happening. Each time, she does what’s needed to reestablish her sense of self: sob, or soak in the sun and read a magazine, or flee. She learns to give herself a break, to cast a wary eye on guilt, shame, and stigma: “I made my top priority to be OK in my body and in my mind. . . .” It sounds simple. But it wasn’t.
It’s no easy thing to provide a glimpse into the churning melancholia of bipolar lows, but Simon manages it—with considerable effect indeed.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-4659-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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