An entertainingly anecdotal, candid, and perspicacious account of a psychiatrist’s career.
A psychiatrist reflects on a long career filled with intriguing patients.
Over the course of debut author Green’s stint as a psychiatrist—he spent 46 years in practice—he encountered just about every kind of patient, the most memorable of which he charmingly chronicles in this recollection. He divides his brief memoir into short-term cases (sometimes a specific problem is adequately addressed quickly or a patient simply abandons treatment) and long-term ones—Green treated one woman for about 30 years. Between those two categories, he groups the patients he managed thematically: anxiety, homesickness, suicide, and more as well as ones that illustrate the mistakes he’s made. In one grouping labeled “Love,” the author freely admits he doesn’t know how to define romance (“I’m just a psychiatrist”), an endearingly unaffected moment of humility characteristic of the entire book. Some of the problems recounted to Green are peculiar—a successful professor simultaneously grieves the loss of a child and his uncommonly small penis. In another instance, the author treated a man who murdered his fiancee when she tried to end the relationship. Along the way, Green lucidly offers the lessons he’s learned, including the limitations of a psychiatrist’s power to produce a cure. He also provides some more general reflections on the psychological state of society, including, for example, the manner in which the current opioid crisis mirrors a general failing on the part of communities at large. The author’s work, while intellectually rigorous, is not written in the dry academic language of a clinician, but is refreshingly informal and unabashed. He doesn’t hesitate to call one patient a “very crazy woman.” And his advice to anyone being doggedly pursued by a potentially violent stalker is not what readers might expect: “Although it is difficult to do, moving far away, remaining incognito, seems like the only safe way. I, myself, would do either that or carry a pistol and if the guy broke the restraining order and came to see me anyway, I would shoot both of his kneecaps while backing off.” Especially for readers about to embark on a career in psychiatry or mental health, this book delivers a cheerfully wise and delightfully frank meditation on an eventful professional life.
An entertainingly anecdotal, candid, and perspicacious account of a psychiatrist’s career.Pub Date: April 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4834-8315-3
Page Count: 82
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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