Fortunately for everyone who has been affected by bipolar disorder, Griffiths—and her notebooks—survived the journey.
A visceral account of the turmoil experienced within a manic-depressive breakdown.
Griffiths (A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World, 2014, etc.) is a dedicated recorder of her experiences. "My notebooks have always been very precious to me,” she writes, “and I travel with them wrapped, waterproofed, closer to me than my passport or money. They are footprints of my thoughts, tracks of journeys, curiosity-paths and desire-lines." What she writes in these notebooks eventually becomes stories, essays, and books, but the notebooks have also provided her with a space to try and make sense of her own mind. Griffiths, a winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, has bipolar disorder and can be susceptible to periods of mania and depression, the risk of both being heightened by exhaustion and stress. In this book, the author explores the period of time after a lengthy book project left her depleted. She was aware of being at risk of a mental break but far enough into it by the point of realization that treatment became exceedingly difficult. However, she was determined to capture as much of it as possible: the "honey on the razor's edge" of being able (or unable) to see things in new ways, hear music differently, ride the rapids of a torrent of ideas and thoughts. Griffiths is a skilled writer who ably harnesses this flood of emotions and thoughts, and her descriptions of the mania and depression are never unwieldy. There were countless times when she could have stopped writing, but Griffiths saw it through, exploring all the places her mind traveled: Greek and Roman views of mental health, the roles of friends and pets, the failings and lifelines of psychotherapy. Eventually, in order to get out of her own head and “see far horizons again,” she set out on the 800-kilometer Camino de Santiago in Spain.
Fortunately for everyone who has been affected by bipolar disorder, Griffiths—and her notebooks—survived the journey.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-726-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
