A sometimes vivid, sometimes vague first-person account of a truly dreadful life and the controversial form of therapy that helped the author come to grips with it. Unlike many therapy patients who have no recollections of childhood abuse until their therapist helps them ``recover'' the memories, Brinson recalls in detail her father's physical abuse of her, her siblings, and her mother. The book is replete with descriptions of the beatings he regularly inflicted on them during her harsh childhood on a South Carolina tobacco farm. The beginnings of her neurotic behavior are apparent in her account of these early tortured years, but as she tells it, her problems didn't fully emerge until she was married and a mother. Brinson depicts herself becoming as abusive as her father had been, spinning so far out of control that she was institutionalized. After countless suicide attempts and years in and out of psychiatric wards, she finally came under the care of Carol Wintermeyer, a clinical psychologist she grew to trust. According to Wintermeyer's preface, Brinson's problems included suicidal- homicidal tendencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder, multiple personality disorder, and neurotic tics and habits. Using hypnotherapy, Wintermeyer took Brinson back to her childhood. In one session, Brinson described hearing her mother shoot and kill her father; the desperate woman then persuaded her daughter to beat her with a belt in order to provide bruises that would mitigate her crime in the eyes of a court. Without offering a conclusion about whether or not this was a recovered memory of an actual event, Brinson makes it the key to understanding and integrating her shattered personality and to accepting herself as a less-than-perfect person. Although the author recounts her childhood with gritty detail, her adult life remains blurry, and what she reveals about her therapy is minimal. Those hoping for insight into the much-disputed practice of eliciting long-buried memories of abuse from psychiatric patients will be disappointed. Decidedly unsatisfactory as a portrait of recovery from mental illness.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-88282-126-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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