This difficult circumnavigation of a dark topic will help soothe survivors, as well as raise awareness about suicide.
A father recounts his exhaustive search for an explanation to his 22-year-old son’s suicide.
Sanchez (Suicide Explained, 2007) quilts memoir, fiction and meditation on the neurological, biochemical and evolution of mental illness into a concise hypothesis. The resulting premise, The Master Illusionist, a Neurological Theory of Psychology, examines the brain down to its molecular roots and weighs potential medications and therapies for mental illness. The technical discussion draws from a bevy of diverse sources, including the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the writings of astronomer Carl Sagan, beloved popular physicist Richard Feynman and numerous academic papers on neurochemistry and pharmacology. Sanchez, admitting that little is known about the brain or suicide, includes a discussion on energy psychology, which applies the eastern concepts of chakras to the study of mental disorders. Theoretical discussions alternate with intimate metaphysical passages that dismiss no coincidence or connection, allowing for transference of souls and reincarnation. Most vivid is Sanchez’s eyewitness account of the death of his son’s namesake, his brother-in-law, in a plane crash just weeks before the birth of his son. Other experiences inspire detailed, Borgesian fictions, elaborate parallels across history to suicides similar to his son’s and explore suicidal minds on the verge of their ultimate act. Another set of fictions, narrated in part by Sacagawea, follows the mental illness of Captain Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The text is sometimes meandering and often irrelevant, but Sanchez always returns to his theme. Mental illnesses like his son’s depression erode the sense of self and the “survival impulses of the organism,” leaving the victim in an agony so extreme that death becomes the only escape. Sanchez stresses the need for a combined treatment of therapy and chemicals, and presses those who are surrounded by mental illness to remain vigilant against this often invisible threat.
This difficult circumnavigation of a dark topic will help soothe survivors, as well as raise awareness about suicide.Pub Date: April 10, 2006
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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