A cathartic and helpful book for those dealing with ambiguous loss.
Clark, a resource and advocacy manager at the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, presents a guide for the caregivers, family, and friends of people living with mental illness.
When the author lost her 23-year-old son to suicide in 2019, she had already been dealing with “ambiguous loss”—that is, the grief experienced when a loved one with severe mental illness is “‘gone,’ as they once were but still around as a new version of themselves.” This book, first and foremost, is aimed at parents of people with serious mental illness (SMI) and is also a form of advocacy for the SMI community at large. In short chapters that each end with a self-reflective activity, Clark provides readers with “self-directed coping guidelines” for their grief, inspiration for telling their own stories, a critique of the “medical/legal system that criminalizes mental illness,” and tips on how to bolster community. A good portion of the book addresses the dark personal experiences the author went through with her son, including watching him make “creepy altars with knives, sticks…and sometimes his own blood.” While these stories are directly related to her son’s diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Clark is clear from the start that ambiguous loss can come in many forms, such as experiencing a miscarriage. Clark seamlessly blends in the work of family therapist and professor Pauline Boss, who coined the term “ambiguous loss,” and psychologist Richard C. Miller, whose concept of working with “opposite emotions” informed Clark’s guidance for naming and normalizing ambivalence. Clark also explains terms like “anosognosia,” a symptom of at least half of those with SMI that makes them unaware that they’re sick. Her periodic poems, such as “Ambiguity,” are jarring at first, but they mirror the inconsistent way in which bipolar disorder affects one’s life: “Life’s only clarity was sheer uncertainty.” She also offers refreshingly simple responses to platitudes about mental illness, such as a measured rebuttal to “everything happens for a reason”: “My son’s struggle with mental illness had no reason to it. I’m trying to find meaning in what’s left of my life, but that doesn’t mean his pain was something the world needed.”
A cathartic and helpful book for those dealing with ambiguous loss.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9781958861950
Page Count: 244
Publisher: The Sager Group
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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