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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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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