Compelling, charming and devastating.
When four out of five family members suffer from bipolar disorder, life at home is volatile.
“Depression is a slow crushing death,” writes Lovelace, who was one of the four. “Mania is a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight-ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and frightening as hell.” He began to show the first signs of bipolar disorder in his late teens, but resisted treatment and counseling for years, preferring instead to self-medicate with a lively mix of illicit drugs, alcohol and extreme travel. Most of the action in his debut memoir centers around a destructive summer during which the author, his father and his younger brother were all committed to psychiatric institutions. Lovelace’s mother had been a depressive for as long as he could remember; he’d witnessed her horrible bouts of postpartum depression after the births of his sister and brother. His father, a minister and scholar of early American religious movements, had seemed merely eccentric until one year when he was hit with a bad case of what the family called “whim-whams.” In the depths of Dad’s depression, the family came unraveled. Lovelace fled his loved ones, and tried to hide from the reality of his own illness. His sister, the only unaffected one in the family, set out for college. Isolated at home with two severely depressed parents, their younger brother eventually lashed out and was hauled off to a mental hospital. The author describes medications and the process of recovery, but his book’s major strength is its language, which beautifully mimics his bipolarity. When Lovelace chronicles a manic episode, the prose comes in breathless, eloquent bursts; when he describes crushing depression, it’s as though all the air is being sucked out of the room.
Compelling, charming and devastating.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-525-95078-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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