A passionate but muddled saga of a man’s battle to have his sanity and intellect recognized.
Redus looks back on a history of abusive care and his struggle to get a hearing for his scientific theories in this memoir.
Undergoing Veterans Administration psychiatric care from the late 1960s, the author stabbed his girlfriend to death in 1974, was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, and was committed to Napa State Hospital in California. He was released as an outpatient in 1988, recommitted in 1994, released again in 2001, and committed again in 2009. This book largely consists of letters he sent to psychiatrists, lawyers, and judges, mostly written from 2010 to 2012 when he was requesting a sanity hearing and release from Napa State and reviewing his mental health issues pursuant to that plea. In the letters, he often revisits the homicide, which he says he committed because his victim had threatened to kill him; he castigates his then-psychiatrist for encouraging him to continue the relationship. Redus also writes about a period in the 1980s when, he alleges, medications forced upon him by another psychiatrist so intoxicated him that he had sex with other male patients on the psych ward, a form of “consensual homosexual rape” for which he holds his doctor responsible (“The rapist was my therapist,” he writes). Addressing his sanity hearing, the author challenges psychiatrists’ depictions of him as angry, paranoid, and unstable, and asks for a “medication holiday” from the anti-psychotic meds prescribed to him. Much of the book expounds on Redus’ cosmological theories, including his “relativistic color television universe” theory, which extends Einstein’s theory of relativity, and his “space-time sphere” theory, which posits that black holes give birth to new universes. Other missives include letters asking NASA officials and astrophysicist Steven Hawking to comment on his theories and a 1994 letter seeking President Bill Clinton’s help in getting his “mental hygiene program” to “fuck off.”
There are flashes of literary quality in Redus’ writings, including a poetic dialogue with an acquaintance who introduced him to acid: “I said, ‘What is LSD like?’ He said, ‘It might be like a big headache. It might be like holding on to a rope for ten hours. It might be like a thin line, or it might be like a color television.’” At its best, Redus’ intense, breathless prose acutely evokes the desperation of a man fighting for his sanity against a callous medical establishment. More common, however, are looping, legalistic rehashes of long-nursed grievances. The scientific chapters are lengthy and involved, and this material may be too abstruse for laymen (“If there is a virtual ‘naked space-time singularity’ and a virtual cosmic censorship inside our STS with a spherical two-dimensional stellar membrane conceptually just at the outer edge sandwiched in between, the central inner and the outer unknown, then the membrane may conceptually be seen as a virtual tessellation of two-dimensional quantum computer screens, hologram screens, or electronic TV screens!”). The result is a twisting ramble through an erratic but creative mind.
A passionate but muddled saga of a man’s battle to have his sanity and intellect recognized.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2022
ISBN: 9781662475788
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Page Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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