A vivid and melancholy exploration into the mental illnesses that affected one woman's family and the radical and damaging...
A woman's search for the truth surrounding the two lobotomies performed on family members.
In this haunting memoir, Sternburg (Optic Nerve, 2005, etc.) seeks to understand why her aunts, mother, and grandmother allowed a lobotomy to be executed on her uncle Bennie after he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and, 10 years later, permitted the almost exact same treatment to be carried out on her aunt Francie. The author weaves together multiple threads: the stories handed down by her aunts and their spouses regarding Bennie and Francie; medical research and insight into lobotomies and why they were so popular for a time; and her own memories of growing up in a disjointed, unhappy family where fear and the feeling of never being good enough lurked in every room. The result is a complex balance of personal thoughts and feelings coupled with the actual and imagined dialogues that must have taken place regarding these challenging decisions. The book is a disclosure of family secrets and an airing of unhappiness, affairs, unfulfilled longings, and desires that created an atmosphere of tension, anxiety, and dread. It is not necessarily a pleasant read with a happy ending, but Sternburg’s writing is incisive, and she deeply explores the boundaries that were unjustly crossed by family members in the name of love. The author also touches on other well-known individuals whose family members had lobotomies, such as Allen Ginsberg's mother and Rosemary Kennedy. Numerous photographs of Sternburg's family, a genealogy, and a comprehensive timeline add additional useful elements to this memorable story.
A vivid and melancholy exploration into the mental illnesses that affected one woman's family and the radical and damaging operations performed to counteract these ailments.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9893604-9-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2015
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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