Suspenseful, behind-closed-doors account of the legal and medical maneuverings that enabled deviously ingenuous killer Ross Michael Carlson to avoid trial from 1983—the year he shot both his parents to death—until his own death in 1989. Weissberg, head of the psychiatric department of Colorado State Hospital, was a prosecution witness in the case. Soon after the killings, irrefutable evidence surfaced that linked Carlson, 19, to the murders. The alibi he had concocted with a gullible school chum crumbled, and, eventually, his bag containing the murder weapon, the floor mat for the Cadillac used in the slayings, surgical gloves, and other incriminating items was discovered. Placed under medical observation, Carlson convinced a series of examining psychiatrists that he was suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder—``the current psychiatric rage'' in 1983, according to Weissberg. The killer claimed to have seven separate personalities inhabiting his psyche: It was supposedly the one named ``Antichrist'' who had pumped two bullets into his parents' heads. Weissberg contends that the accused—hiring one of Colorado's most successful and flamboyant defense lawyers—made a mockery of the criminal-justice system, thanks largely to the efforts of defense psychiatrists and to judges who were intimidated by their ``expert'' testimony: The author's scorn for these legal and medical ``hired guns'' is palpable. After five years, Carlson was found competent to stand trial; but by then, ironically, it was discovered that he had contracted leukemia and had only months to live. Weissberg keeps the narrative moving briskly and without scientific jargon, stumbling only in some strained, nearly pseudomystical speculations about Carlson's motives. Overall: an eye-opening report, told with unusual frankness and a great deal of righteous anger. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs-not seen.)
Pub Date: July 7, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-30536-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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