It’s no easy thing to provide a glimpse into the churning melancholia of bipolar lows, but Simon manages it—with...
A cross-country road trip—mostly lucid, sometimes scary: the bipolar Simon interviews other bipolar people who have been successfully treated and now lead highly functional lives, while she regularly gets pounded by her own disorder.
She opens with a guided tour into her mental illness, telling how in high school she became jittery, then confused, layering anxieties upon anxieties, finding it increasingly difficult to speak or stop the tears, moving toward a paranoia that convinced her the CIA was out to kidnap her cat. The tour is impressive—with its darting sentences, stops and starts, gasped breaths—for the way it conveys the smothering, agitated brain fever Simon was feeling. She gets help, is given medication to bring the chemistry into a semblance of balance, and it isn’t long before she formulates the idea of a road trip to find her herd of people: bipolars who have laid siege to their disorder. She swings low out of New York and west across the southern tier, talking to others about the circumstances of their disorder, what went right for them, what things they did that gave them a leg up. This is no easy road; Simon knows, as do her interviewees, that one’s mercurial nature can leak through the medication, and she knows the fear that comes with hearing the biochemical and psychological cues that that’s happening. Each time, she does what’s needed to reestablish her sense of self: sob, or soak in the sun and read a magazine, or flee. She learns to give herself a break, to cast a wary eye on guilt, shame, and stigma: “I made my top priority to be OK in my body and in my mind. . . .” It sounds simple. But it wasn’t.
It’s no easy thing to provide a glimpse into the churning melancholia of bipolar lows, but Simon manages it—with considerable effect indeed.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-4659-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
Well-told and admonitory.
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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