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THE LIVING DEAD

Name: THE LIVING DEAD
Author: John Willis Berry Jr.
ISBN: 978-1-976463-75-4

by John Willis Berry Jr. edited by Kimberly Berry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2017

An unusual remembrance that presents the experience of mental illness from the inside.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)