Forthright and well-written, but essentially superficial.
As part of her ongoing work as an “immersion journalist” (Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man, 2006, etc.), Vincent checked into three different mental institutions; she found the experience both numbing and life-changing.
Having battled periods of depression throughout her life, and being well-acquainted with the use of medications such as Lamictal and Prozac, the author had no trouble getting admitted for an average two-week stay as a patient in the three institutions: Meriwether, a public Bedlam in the Northeast; St. Luke’s, a small Catholic hospital “in the middle of the plains”; and a private rehab facility called Mobius, specializing in “process therapy.” She rates and compares them, admitting from the start that she is deeply suspicious of the way the medical profession handles mental illness, the causes and mechanisms of which remain little understood. Treatments ranged from comforting and stabilizing to abusive and perfunctory. The aggressiveness with which doctors pushed drugs on their addled patients, especially at Meriwether, shocked Vincent. She resolved not to take hers and observed that in comparison to her heavily doped ward-mates, she “enjoyed a comparatively stunning range of motion and mental agility.” Her account is replete with compassionate descriptions of fellow inmates. Some were more hardened than others, but all craved the merest glimmer of recognition of their humanity. Healing, the author realized after her stay at Mobius, cannot be achieved at any institution without the active participation of the patient, and even at the fancy rehab clinic the patients were rarely receptive; thus containment and medication remained the norm. Vincent is a sharp observer and an intelligent analyst, but she doesn’t provide any context to help readers understand the larger issues involved. She utterly ignores the vast literature on mental illness, from Freud and Foucault to Mary Jane Ward and Kay Redfield Jamison, and doesn’t include a bibliography.
Forthright and well-written, but essentially superficial.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-01971-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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