An inspiring account of healing and helping.
The psychologist who developed dialectical behavior therapy to treat suicidal individuals reflects on her own life in this gripping memoir.
Linehan (DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, 2014, etc.) grew up in a “reasonably well-off” family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1940s and ’50s. A “happy-go-lucky, confident high school girl,” though not a good fit for her more sedate family, she experienced a breakdown during her senior year of high school and was institutionalized for more than two years at the Institute for Living in Hartford, Connecticut. The psychoactive drugs and electroconvulsive therapy she was given, in addition to long periods of solitary confinement, left her with few memories of her childhood and adolescence, which she reconstructs here with the help of others. Linehan went on to study psychology and, later, train as a Zen master and work as a research scientist at the University of Washington. These Western and Eastern strands combined to influence the therapeutic protocol she developed, which has been clinically proven to benefit those affected by borderline personality disorder and suicidal tendencies. DBT, one of the first psychological treatment plans to incorporate the teaching of mindfulness, combines a recognition and deep acceptance of what the patient is feeling with the implementation of a behavioral plan for change. While the technique may not strike readers as revolutionary as Linehan contends it is, the author obviously has deep empathy for those she treats and a willingness to try a range of techniques to help them. Although she has chosen not to write about any of her clients, for the sake of their privacy, her description of her own slow, uneven recovery from what she calls a version of hell is compelling, and it's easy to see how it would translate to other individuals. While she doesn't stress the point, it's also clear that both the spiritual and practical approaches she takes would also benefit those with less extreme psychological challenges.
An inspiring account of healing and helping.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9461-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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