Forthright and well-written, but essentially superficial.
As part of her ongoing work as an “immersion journalist” (Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man, 2006, etc.), Vincent checked into three different mental institutions; she found the experience both numbing and life-changing.
Having battled periods of depression throughout her life, and being well-acquainted with the use of medications such as Lamictal and Prozac, the author had no trouble getting admitted for an average two-week stay as a patient in the three institutions: Meriwether, a public Bedlam in the Northeast; St. Luke’s, a small Catholic hospital “in the middle of the plains”; and a private rehab facility called Mobius, specializing in “process therapy.” She rates and compares them, admitting from the start that she is deeply suspicious of the way the medical profession handles mental illness, the causes and mechanisms of which remain little understood. Treatments ranged from comforting and stabilizing to abusive and perfunctory. The aggressiveness with which doctors pushed drugs on their addled patients, especially at Meriwether, shocked Vincent. She resolved not to take hers and observed that in comparison to her heavily doped ward-mates, she “enjoyed a comparatively stunning range of motion and mental agility.” Her account is replete with compassionate descriptions of fellow inmates. Some were more hardened than others, but all craved the merest glimmer of recognition of their humanity. Healing, the author realized after her stay at Mobius, cannot be achieved at any institution without the active participation of the patient, and even at the fancy rehab clinic the patients were rarely receptive; thus containment and medication remained the norm. Vincent is a sharp observer and an intelligent analyst, but she doesn’t provide any context to help readers understand the larger issues involved. She utterly ignores the vast literature on mental illness, from Freud and Foucault to Mary Jane Ward and Kay Redfield Jamison, and doesn’t include a bibliography.
Forthright and well-written, but essentially superficial.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-01971-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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