A simultaneously painful and inspiring page-turner.
A no-holds-barred “biography of depression,” based on the alternating journal entries of a mother and daughter.
Cinda Johnson, who directs the special education graduate program at Seattle University, and her daughter Linea, a mental-health advocate and national speaker, jointly chronicle the first five years of Linea's ongoing battle to overcome the ravages of bipolar disorder. First diagnosed while in high school, Linea still battles “anorexia, anxiety, and depression,” but she explains that her episodes are now controllable. “My relationship with bipolar has evolved…My illness is part of me, it is something that affects my life,” she writes, “but it is something, not all. It is not my life; my life is merely affected by it. It does not define me if I don’t let it.” The author and her mother describe the evolution of her disease and the difficult struggle they both faced in coming to terms with it. Even though Cinda trained special-education teachers to deal with mental illness, she found it difficult to accept it in her own daughter, a popular high-achiever whose goal was to become a professional musician. This is a gritty account of what it is like to be down in the trenches with mental illness—fighting suicidal thoughts, battling the aftereffects of shock treatment, dealing with medication and its side effects and resisting the temptations of alcohol and street drugs. While Linea was battling for sanity, Cinda and her husband faced the difficult challenge of balancing their desire to protect their daughter with the need to respect her privacy and freedom. Ultimately, it was Linea who decided to give up her career aspirations, move back to Seattle from Chicago, where she had been attending college, advocate for the mentally ill and work to “create a world free of stigma.”
A simultaneously painful and inspiring page-turner.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-58182-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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