An unusual remembrance that presents the experience of mental illness from the inside.
A posthumously published memoir written in the 1960s by a mentally ill African-American man who grew up in Mississippi during the Great Depression and later migrated to Michigan and Ohio.
Readers may want to start with this book’s afterword, which offers the late author’s granddaughter’s explanation that “He was sick, and he was delusional. He committed horrible crimes. And he believed that he was the Messiah. And help was not available to him as a poor black man.” Berry begins his story by recounting his first year in school, around 1930, during which he was frequently teased and bullied by both white and black children: “I had light-colored skin, like that of my mother, and it was this factor that opened a new door to another hell of color for me,” he writes. Quickly, he moves his memoir forward to when he was 11, lying down under a tree, contemplating the multitude of injustices in the world: “So I just lay there thinking until I thought I fell asleep, but was to realize later that I had died instead, and saw that I was in the midst of a world of water, which was moving back and forth.” What follows are many other sometimes-poetic, often rambling pages describing his travels through water, sky, and time; then Berry “returns” home after what feels like many years, confused and disoriented. The author offers no explanation for this passage of time, and from this point on, Berry says that he’s convinced he’s both dead and alive. However, there’s a disarming lucidity to his prose when he depicts his later life in Detroit. He marries, has children, and holds down three jobs at once—until he attempts to kill his wife. However, other than the facts of his marriage and his children, it’s impossible for readers to know which parts of the memoir are true and which are purely delusions. Overall, it’s a dark and disturbing, if difficult-to-follow, journey through the mind of a man who was both kind and dangerous and who suffered a lifetime of untreated illness.
An unusual remembrance that presents the experience of mental illness from the inside.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-976463-75-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
