A deeply informed investigation of a poet’s suffering and creative triumph.
A renowned psychologist connects bipolar disorder to creativity.
MacArthur Fellow Jamison (Psychiatry/Johns Hopkins Univ. School of Medicine; Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir, 2009, etc.) brings her professional expertise to an intimate, sensitive, and perceptive account of the illness from which poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977) suffered most of his life: bipolar disorder, characterized by violent mood swings, an illness from which Jamison also suffers. Drawing on Lowell’s medical records, Jamison closely examines the course of his disease and the various treatments—psychotherapy, electroconvulsive shock treatments, drug therapy—offered to Lowell as medical knowledge evolved. Mania has a long cultural and scientific history, which the author recounts in fascinating detail. Her focus, though, is on Lowell, who was first hospitalized in 1949; subsequent episodes recurred throughout his life, often requiring monthslong hospital stays. Lithium allowed him longer stretches of stability, but Jamison believes it dampened his creativity. Unfortunately for the narrative—and surely for Lowell—the onslaught and course of illness repeat the same trajectory: “the mind leaps; speech rushes; words ribbon out fast, unbidden, cutting. Ideas and schemes proliferate, alliances shift.” Lowell suffered grandiose delusions, hallucinations, religious mania, and impetuous love affairs, much to the dismay of his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. Jamison offers chilling testimony of these episodes from Hardwick, Lowell’s friends, and his doctors, and she mines Lowell’s poetry and letters for his own responses. The author insists, as she has done in previous books, that mania corresponds to artistic brilliance and intellectual prowess; manic patients display “enhanced memory and originality”; biographical studies of individuals of “creative eminence” reveal a high rate of mental disorders; and students who perform exceptionally well in music and language “were four times more likely to be hospitalized later for bipolar disorder” than were average students. Similarly, records of 20 “socially important families” revealed that they were “saturated with manic-depressive psychosis.” Jamison argues persuasively that mania fueled Lowell’s poetry, but her celebration of psychosis seems to romanticize an affliction that she presents as devastating.
A deeply informed investigation of a poet’s suffering and creative triumph.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-307-70027-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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