A young man grapples with bipolar “voices” via religion, hedonism, activism, and Lithium.
In his debut, Monroe-Kane, a Peabody Award–winning public radio producer, brings a fresh perspective to familiar memoir territory. During his childhood, his impoverished family stressed a spirit of eccentric independence, which enabled him to conceal symptoms of mania. “For the most part, I didn’t worry much about the voices,” he writes. “But at night, things could get dicey.” In adolescence, the author was drawn first to evangelicalism, deciding the voices meant he’d been “anointed by God as his special emissary,” then to the Mennonites he met at a small religious college. Diagnosed as schizophrenic following a breakdown in college, he threw himself into volunteer missionary work, which led to immersion in the leftist radical scene around Amsterdam. He enjoyed sexual and chemical awakenings, while his manic energy compelled him to organize grass-roots events, although his frustrated comrades eventually expelled him after a monthlong LSD binge. Humiliated, he then went to Prague, where the post-communist cultural awakening inspired him to give up psychiatric medication for the next 15 years. “The time had come,” he writes, “…to bring back the voices. To admit more loose associations.” The narrative speeds up into a further blur of hard drug use and sex until an ominous encounter with organized crime during a scheme to open the city’s first internet cafe points him (rather neatly) toward a resolution. The conclusion finds the author married with children, done with hard drugs, but relying on therapy and medication: “My daily doses were back, and with them returned all the old doubts.” Monroe-Kane writes about his fevered youth clearly and thoughtfully, underscoring how religious fervor, politics, and a party lifestyle can all mesh dangerously with mental illness.
A casually told but often compelling account of wrestling with inner turmoil against gritty, dramatic international settings.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-299-31000-4
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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