A gripping inside-out view of one woman's psychosis and of her struggle to convince self-involved doctors that its origin is physical. In 1987, Deitrick, 25, was involved in a minor auto accident and was taken to a hospital for observation. When she cowered in terror at the doctor's questions and didn't remember the accident, she was placed in the psychiatric ward. After being released to her parents' custody, she went on a manic grocery- shopping binge, cutting ballerina twirls in the aisles and filling grocery carts for four hours. As a result, she was committed to another mental hospital where ``concerned'' doctors and nurses patted her on the shoulder, telling her not to worry when she persisted in asking what was wrong with her. An unauthorized glance at her file showed they had diagnosed her as having bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia, but Deitrick tried desperately to convince the doctors that there was something wrong with her physically. Her conviction withstood even the delusions and hallucinations she was experiencing—when she asked her doctor why she had to be on Thorazine, he appeared to be encircled by clouds with his voice coming down a long tube. Looking about the ward, she constantly asked herself, ``What does this all mean?'' and ``What did I do?'' After five days of being shot up with huge doses of Thorazine in what her doctor called ``sleep therapy,'' she frantically appealed to a new physician- -who listened. He discovered a small tumor on her brain stem that was causing her symptoms. Deitrick's plaintive voice draws us imperceptibly into a world of madness in which faces, conversations, and events loom up with an eerie fidelity, and the world lies behind heavy glass, frightening and bewildering. A painful and fascinating tale; film rights sold.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-88282-103-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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