Complex, chilling, luminous: not one false step.
In lyrical, honest language, a painter describes her adolescence in a New York psychiatric hospital.
In 1967, 15-year-old Lewis was remanded to a psychiatric facility following charges of drug use and school truancies. She remained there until her 18th birthday. Her first-person, present-tense narrative describes her life with other adolescents deemed “unmanageable.” Lewis, 13-year-old Marjee (committed for swallowing 20 aspirin), heroin addict Laurie, and high-school dropout Harold form a community of sorts as they spend their days on the ward medicated, endlessly smoking cigarettes, under close observation. By the time Lewis is 18, most of her friends have been released or have run away while on weekend passes. Misdiagnosed as an acute schizophrenic and plied with a cocktail of drugs including Thorazine (the drug’s manufacturer was a major funder of the hospital’s research studies), Lewis is afraid of being a “career mental patient.” She throws herself into her schoolwork, gets a part-time job outside the hospital, and is allowed to go home on the occasional weekend. She’s completely unprepared, then, when the staff encourages her to sign herself in voluntarily when she turns 18, and her angry response gets her shipped to the state mental hospital. Terrified that she’ll never be released, Lewis desperately pulls herself together and within a month is free. The memoir’s second half chronicles her attempts at self-rehabilitation. She becomes an artist, creates a circle of friends and lovers, and works as an advocate for mental patients. Finally, 33 years after her admittance, Lewis requests a copy of her hospital records and visits her old ward. Her former psychiatrist admits that the heavy medication and lengthy incarceration of adolescents is now viewed as harmful; therapy has changed since the mid-1960s. Lewis tries to locate her friends from that time and discovers that many have committed suicide, while others suffer extreme side effects from their medication.
Complex, chilling, luminous: not one false step.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-1149-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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