A jarring, compelling account of bipolar disease.
A harrowing look at mental illness and drug addiction.
Bipolar disorder has earned significant media attention. The glamour from movie stars and musicians who suffer from the mental illness has rubbed off on the disease, giving some the idea that it’s a benign condition falling somewhere between moodiness and ADD. The brutal reality of bipolar disorder is fitfully explored in Bipolar Bare. Davis rips away the gloss and exposes the raw emotional bruises that the illness creates. With a forward by the author’s psychiatrist and vivid drawings of his nightmares and warped fantasies, the memoir reads like a mental patient’s journal. Davis tells his story from two perspectives–his and that of his alter ego Carlotta. This character is a whore/dominatrix/angel who guides and admonishes him. Both narrators escort readers through the author’s crack addiction, suicide attempts, institutionalization and cross-dressing. Much like the wildly diverging thoughts of an unstable mind, the book veers from the present to the past, from reality to dreams. It’s a difficult format to follow, but remains engaging. The author devotes a large portion of his writing to the dysfunctional wasteland of his childhood. Abandoned by his privileged father and nightclub-singer mother, he puzzles through how his youth affected the rest of his life. It’s never clear what is fact and what is imagination, but Davis clearly did not receive much nurturing as a child. He recalls being locked in dressing rooms as his mother performed in clubs and being handed off to a grandmother who cared more for family heirlooms than her grandson. In between these childhood memories, the author inserts scenes of him smoking a crack pipe as his wife prepares for work, stealing his stepmother’s bra and girdle to wear when he’s alone and contemplating suicide as he leans over a bridge. Readers may have trouble keeping track of so many voices and stories, but this memoir courageously captures Davis’ mental struggles and riveting climb to recovery.
A jarring, compelling account of bipolar disease.Pub Date: March 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-2070-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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