A provocative, poetic foray into melancholia from both a personal and historical perspective. While working as a psychiatric caseworker in Missoula, Minn., first-time author Smith is thrust into a depression that even the newest antidepressants can—t alleviate. In attempting to understand his melancholia, Smith researches this mystifying condition, which continues to afflict people worldwide. Regardless of how it originates, concludes Smith, clinical depression results from biochemical changes in the brain. And half of those with one episode relapse within 18 months, while some will be plagued by depression for life. Smith is particularly effective in describing his own depression, when everyday details overwhelm him and his only company is “Mr. Shoulder,” who monitors his every thought and mood to the point of paralyzing him. He writes “that my life felt distant even to me.” Also intriguing is Smith’s chronicle of society’s changing views of depression. In Renaissance Europe, in Elizabethan England, and to the 19th-century Romantics in Germany and Great Britain, depressive illness was deemed a great gift. People even feigned melancholia, because it was considered an experience that deepened and enriched one’s soul. With our society’s emphasis on productivity, depression is regarded as an unwelcome intrusion that is costly to corporate America. The contemporary solution is a quick fix that allows expedient return to the marketplace. And it’s this quick chemical fix that troubles Smith. Only when he abandons medication and allows his illness to awaken him spiritually and metaphysically does he conquer his depression. Smith continues to take jobs to help others with psychological problems and brain injuries, and is critical of patients— families “who preferred the memory [of the victim when healthy] to the present reality—[and whose] spouses had all filed for divorce.” Brimming with insight and intelligence, an endearing memoir. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-86547-542-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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