A courageously unequivocal self-portrait of bipolar disorder.
A Los Angeles businessman living with bipolar disorder recalls his time spent in the county jail in this debut memoir.
Good’s book opens with a gunshot. In a chapter entitled “The World Breaks,” the author describes his father’s suicide at 66 years old. As a physician who was suffering intolerable pain following surgery, he misdiagnosed what was discovered to be a treatable condition and took his own life. The author, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2014, believes that his father’s decision was influenced by the same mental illness. The distinction he draws between himself and his father is that “the world broke me, but it did not kill me.” The irrational behavior symptomatic of the disorder led Good to be incarcerated in LA County Jail for 113 days. A buildup of stress caused him to throw a stapler through the window of his rented Pasadena apartment, shattering glass onto a mother and son walking on the street below. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and vandalism. The book recalls his days surviving prison as well as recounting Good’s leaving his wife and two daughters for his “long-lost love” Cora and time spent in a mental institution after being released from jail. The author describes the intensity of his manic episodes. While working in Beijing, he impulsively took the elevator to the top of a 37-floor building, found his way to the roof, dropped onto the balcony of the penthouse apartment, and smashed through the glass terrace door to escape. Good confides that he was initially reluctant to divulge his bipolar disorder to others, as “they would not understand.” But his writing captures with clarity what it means to experience the disorder, particularly with regard to manic phases. When recalling his perilous experience atop the Beijing skyscraper, he writes: “The floor to ceiling glass was thick. The glass on the door looked thinner, though. So, I took the bench and pushed it through the door glass. It entered surprisingly easily. It shattered.” His sentences have a rapid, staccato tempo, echoing the fast-talking, highly energetic urgency and irrationality symptomatic of a manic episode. The author’s writing also captures the impulsiveness and sheer bluntness that are characteristics of bipolar disorder. On reuniting with Cora, he confesses: “All the affection and love I had for my wife disappeared. I had never heard of that happening to anyone.” As the book progresses, Good demonstrates how his understanding of his condition developed. He came to terms with the chaos associated with bipolar behavior but also discovered he “was both its instigator and victim.” He placed an emphasis on the religious taking of medication even though it allowed him to painfully remember all the people he “harmed.” This bold memoir is not about hiding from mental illness or forgetting its consequences; it is concerned with developing a deeper understanding of the self and determinedly facing adversity. Many confronting similar struggles should empathize with Good and find hope in his story.
A courageously unequivocal self-portrait of bipolar disorder.Pub Date: June 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72087-326-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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