by Federico Sanchez ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2006
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
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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