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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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