A thorough and thoughtful manual on a challenging illness.
Rose turns his struggles with bipolar disorder into advice for others in this debut motivational work.
Bipolar disorder, with its periods of mania, hypomania, and depression, can derail a person’s life. Although there’s no cure, per se, one can find effective ways to live with it: “I have been able to manage my bipolar illness without hospitalization for the last 25 years,” writes the author. However, success is about “more than just avoiding the psychiatric hospitalization; it is being able to have an active and meaningful business and family life.” Rose shares how he uses methods of his own design to grow what he calls “the Mid-Polar Zone”—a middle ground between depression and mania. The author comes from a family of people who have struggled with bipolar illness (including tragic victims of disorder-related suicide), and he was hospitalized for it in the late 1960s, when treatments were nothing short of brutal. This book serves as a road map to avoid such outcomes, aiming to help readers to identify symptoms of the disorder, investigate different medications, manage their activities, and find useful resources. Each chapter concludes with a “Recovery Action Sheet” that clearly states a disorder-management goal and offers a numbered list of actions that readers can take to achieve it. Rose’s prose style is earnest but direct, balancing empathy with frank advice: “One thing that happens, especially in manic waves of energy, is that we become convinced we are right….It is much more important in relationships to learn to be wrong than it is to be right.” The author makes clear that he isn’t a medical professional, and he encourages readers to seek medical treatment and to read more scientific works on bipolar illness. However, Rose’s guide may, in conjunction with professional help, provide a supportive, action-based regimen that will allow sufferers to feel more in control of their lives.
A thorough and thoughtful manual on a challenging illness.Pub Date: March 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991112-0-8
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Bipolar Wellness Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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