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LET ME NOT BE MAD

Name: LET ME NOT BE MAD
Author: A.K. Benjamin
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4438-0

MY STORY OF UNRAVELING MINDS

by A.K. Benjamin ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2019

A well-conceived and -written exploration of the traps hidden in the art of mental healing.

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“Can you have a breakdown in a breakdown?” Clinical neuropsychologist Benjamin delivers tales of disturbed minds—not least of them his own.

Listen, assess, prescribe: It’s a process that every psychiatrist follows, sometimes countless times in the course of a working year. But what is that doctor hearing? “Studies have shown that your generation, our generation, lies on average two or three times every ten minutes, men to make themselves look better, women to feel good,” writes the author. So how much of the assessment is built on untruths, and how much on observable reality? As Benjamin notes, an average one may contain 100 mistruths, depending on what and how much the patient chooses to reveal. Some of the cases that present themselves to the author are sufferers from dementia, which itself can hide behind misrepresentations, as he recounts when trying to attend to his own mother, “a mother and son mirroring each other’s confusion.” Others are grandiose, delusional, even dangerous. As Benjamin observes, attempts to help are often of the blind-men-and-elephant variety, with different specialists often coming to very different conclusions about a single patient—the oncologist looking for the brain tumor, the psychologist looking for the moment of fracture in a person’s history, and so forth. Given all this, the author ironically proposes an entry in the diagnostician’s manual for a syndrome named after himself, one that describes “an obsession with the singularity of your diagnosis while fearing that any specific diagnosis is too narrow.” So it’s small wonder that so many mental health workers suffer from plaguing doubts and maladies of their own, alleviated, perhaps, by the thought that “however sick, however mad, there would always be someone worse in need of looking after.”

A well-conceived and -written exploration of the traps hidden in the art of mental healing.

Pub Date: June 11, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5247-4438-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PSYCHOLOGY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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)