A poignant account with an optimistic conclusion, if not a happy ending.
One family’s struggle against the ravages of schizophrenia.
Award-winning Independent Iraq correspondent Patrick Cockburn (Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq, 2008, etc.) and his 26-year-old son Henry, a diagnosed schizophrenic, collaborate to tell the story of battling an acute mental illness. In 2002, Henry was a British college student who appeared to be happily launched on an artistic career until—without any obvious precipitating cause—he began to hear voices that prompted him to endanger his life by wandering naked in winter, plunging into icy water and engaging in other dangerous activities. Believing that he was undergoing an exhilarating religious experience, he avoided taking anti-psychotic medications and engineered daring escapes from the various mental institutions where he was being held in protective custody against his will. The author writes movingly about the harrowing times faced by the family as they awaited his recapture, fearful for his life and safety. Henry recounts his experiences on the run, hooking up with a variety of street people and sometimes simply wandering through fields getting battered and bruised, facing hunger and inclement weather. Although his grandmother suffered from depression, there is no known family history of schizophrenia. A heavy user of marijuana in his teens, he describes his life during adolescence as “a sort of haze.” His parents had tolerated his marijuana use, believing the drug to be “fairly harmless,” and only learned during his hospitalization of “its possible devastating impact on somebody genetically predisposed to schizophrenia.” By 2007, Henry had come to terms with the realities of his situation and accepted medication. In 2009, his condition had stabilized sufficiently to allow him to move to a rehabilitation unit in a London suburb, an institution that offered greater personal freedom, although he still contends with hallucinatory experiences.
A poignant account with an optimistic conclusion, if not a happy ending.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5470-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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
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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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