An unvarnished account of a boundary-pushing procedure and patient.
The candid self-portrait of a woman who, years deep in depression’s clutches, mustered the courage to live again by way of dying.
In her third book, acclaimed “mommy blogger” Armstrong (Dear Daughter: The Best of the Dear Leta Letters, 2012, etc.), the founder of the popular website dooce, tells the intriguing story of how she was put into a coma 10 times as part of a controversial experimental procedure to overcome severe clinical depression. In a narrative that is part cathartic confessional, part apology to those who stood by her through years of anguish and recovery, and part accessible explanation of a highly scientific procedure, the author takes readers on a room-by-room tour of events leading to the treatment that finally helped her overcome her depression. “I’d been almost brain-dead for fifteen minutes,” she writes of the first session. “I felt fantastic! When you want to be dead, there’s nothing quite like being dead. And boy, did I do dead well.” Chronicling how the anesthesiologists used propofol (“the Michael Jackson drug”) to induce the coma, the author writes that “the study is designed to determine if ‘burst suppression’—quieting the brain’s electrical activity—can alleviate the symptoms of depression.” Later, she continues, “it’s like rebooting a computer. Anyone who has ever had problems with a computer knows that sometimes you have to turn it on and off again several times to fix whatever glitch was causing all your applications to crash.” Instead of detailing the personal hells of the glitch itself, Armstrong tactfully walks around it, poring over past failed therapies. She provides an experiential blow-by-blow chronicle of the test study, its effects on her daily life, the progressive improvement of her condition, and the reactions of her daughters, unconditionally dedicated mother, and the team of specialists overseeing the closely monitored deaths and rebirths that ultimately led to her victory.
An unvarnished account of a boundary-pushing procedure and patient.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9704-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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