A deeply sympathetic psychobiography of Bruno Bettelheim, the much honored yet controversial therapist who for nearly three decades directed the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, a Freudian-based residential treatment center for disturbed children. When Sutton, Paris correspondent for National Public Radio and the London Daily News, began work on this biography in mid- 1990, Bettelheim had, she says, ``all the trappings of a saint.'' However, within weeks of his suicide that year, former patients began accusing him of brutality and sadism, creating a scandal that left even his close associates confused. To understand this complex man, Sutton begins by looking at his family—a syphilitic father, a mother who regarded him as ugly—and finds in his childhood the seeds of lifelong anger, shame, and self-contempt. In 1938 Bettelheim, a prosperous Viennese merchant becoming deeply involved in psychoanalysis, was arrested by the Nazis and spent ten months in concentration camps. At Buchenwald, says Sutton, Bettelheim, a chronic depressive, discovered the strength of his will to survive, a discovery that prompted him to devote his life to working with troubled children. His observations of human behavior at Buchenwald led to writings that established his reputation in the US, where he fled after his release in 1939. By the 1940s Bettelheim had become a new man, with a new profession, a new family, and even a new, self-invented past. Sutton concentrates on his years at the Orthogenic School, where ``his talent as a clinician sprang from his personality, his history, and his wounds.'' According to Sutton, his inner child took over at times, making him ``grandiose, demanding, provocative.'' That he exaggerated his success in treating autism and that he invented his professional background Sutton acknowledges. Whether he ever brutalized children in his care is less clear. A revealing study that nevertheless leaves Bettelheim as controversial as ever.
Pub Date: May 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-00635-3
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
