A valuable contribution to the history of mental health care and of the racist applications of medicine.
A penetrating study of color-line injustices in the realm of psychiatry.
Some 25,000 bodies lie buried behind the Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, the world’s “largest graveyard of disabled people,” part of the world’s largest mental asylum. Founded in 1842 and operational until a decade ago, it was part of a system that, as with other institutions in the Deep South, was divided by race. Mentally ill (or so declared, at any rate) African Americans were put to work in fields and factories and deprived of books, writing materials, and personal items; mentally ill whites were given more leeway and greater privileges. Social justice activist Segrest interrogates the records to give specific weight to such charges. She notes, for example, that when it came to calico dresses at the time of the supposedly separate-but-equal tenet of Plessy v. Ferguson, “white women got one thousand and colored women got a negligible thirty-five.” (The term “colored,” she explains in the opening pages, is a term of art of statisticians of the period, as are such designations as “imbeciles” and “lunatics.”) Valuably, the author also examines psychiatric files to investigate presumed offenses that brought African Americans to Milledgeville in the first place. Many women, for their part, were hospitalized with what would now likely be characterized as PTSD following physical abuse, rape, and other assaults. The hospital operated on “modern” theories promulgated by specialists who were likely in the early 20th century to advocate sterilization of the mentally ill in the interest of eugenics, with Georgia standing at “the epicenter of race and psychiatry” in inflicting this punishment on African Americans disproportionally. For those who suppose that all is well now, Segrest concludes, pointedly, that the “struggle for equity in medicine and health in the United States and globally is not won, and may not be for a while.”
A valuable contribution to the history of mental health care and of the racist applications of medicine.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62097-297-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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