How psychotherapy led to control and ultimate disaster in a West Coast community, narrated by journalist Mithers (author of the much ballyhooed 1982 Village Voice article ``My Life as a Man''). In 1967, Arthur Janov claimed to have found a cure for neurosis through regression to the infant state, culminating in what he called the ``primal scream.'' A few years later, Joe Hart and Riggs Corriere led a group of defectors from Janov's Primal Institute to set up The Center for Feeling Therapy, where people would not only confront their past pain but move beyond it to change their present lives through the breakdown of their defenses and the discovery of their ``true'' feelings. Soon, the therapists formed a kind of hierarchy and assumed more and more power over the patients. Public confessions were demanded and individuals were humiliated (``busted''), and even physically brutalized. Mithers tells how the therapy became a whole way of life and participants lost contact with the outside world as they formed a tightly connected community of ``the sane.'' As the 70's progressed, therapists would determine what was reality, keeping women, for example, submissive and virtually starving in order to be thin and ``feminine.'' Women were also forced to engage in assigned sexual encounters and undergo abortions as the therapists required. Mithers discerns a pattern of young, impressionable people caught up in a relentless dynamic of transference and the dream of an ideal community. To leave it, they believed, would literally be suicide. Mithers writes with massive detail, gained from first-hand contact with 48 members. The group began to fall apart when Joe Hart quietly left, but not without noting disturbing similarities in the Center's methods to Dr. Louis West's analysis of brainwashing: a process of debilitation, dependency, and dread. The end came when the therapists were absent for two months and patients began to ask questions, such as ``Where is all the money?'' Nearly a decade of lawsuits were to follow. A terrifying story, brilliantly told, as well as a commentary on American culture during the 1970's.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-57071-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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