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 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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