by Brian J. Robinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 31, 2017
An astute, if sometimes-undisciplined, remembrance.
A personal memoir recounts a young man’s battle with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as well as the drugs he used to tame it.
Debut author Robinson attended the prestigious Ranney School in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, but started to experience academic trouble in the fifth grade. He perennially questioned his own intelligence, and although he tested well, he was beset by the anger, frustration, and self-recrimination that resulted from chronic underperformance. The author was eventually diagnosed with ADHD, and while he was at Tulane University, he says, he was introduced to Adderall by his girlfriend. Robinson had already sought a reprieve from chronic restlessness in alcohol with predictably unspectacular results, and Adderall, he felt, was like a miracle—and he became woefully dependent upon it. But even after he confessed to his therapist that he’d developed an addiction, he was prescribed it yet again. After he manically pledged to go on a hunger strike to protest American troops in Iraq, his father called paramedics to have him hospitalized. Later, the author would wrestle with another drug problem, this time with Ritalin, after a failed attempt to get a show produced in Hollywood. Robinson finally repaired his life, learned to manage his ADHD, started his own debt-settlement business, and got married. Although this book is principally a memoir, the author also discusses his reservations about the psychiatric community’s reliance on medication to treat cognitive disorders, as well as the American educational system’s failure to accommodate the needs of afflicted students. Robinson’s remembrance is an intimate one, brimming with courageous candor and bracing self-critique. He intelligently describes the alienation he felt, due to his condition: he was mortified by his underachievement and envied “neurotypicals.” What emerges is a poignant self-portrait of a rather young man (he was 23 years old when he wrote this book) who’s exceedingly talented but just as angry—not just about his condition, but also at the lack of resources available to assist those who have it. A philosophy major in college, Robinson is accustomed to plumbing the depths of meaning in life, and he often does so with charm and verve. Problematically, though, the prose can be clumsy and leaden, with real insights buried in interminable sentences, often marred with mistakes: “In the utilitarian point of view of our nation’s school system, the education that maximizes the number of students who benefit from a curriculum geared toward the predominant a [sic] learning style are ultimately responsible for minimizing the potential of students with different cognitive styles.” Also, the author’s youthful spiritedness can also come across as callowness at times; he’s peremptorily dismissive of religion and too often describes traditional education as an exercise in herd-mentality brainwashing. Further, while his criticisms of higher education and psychiatry are trenchant, he offers little in the way of substantive alternatives. One may forgive Robinson for such unripe reflections, given his age, but it’s also hard not to hope for a more seasoned sequel further down the line.
An astute, if sometimes-undisciplined, remembrance.Pub Date: July 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63393-431-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Charlayne Hunter-Gault
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by David Hajdu
BOOK REVIEW
by David Hajdu ; illustrated by John Carey
BOOK REVIEW
by John Carey
BOOK REVIEW
by John Carey
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.