A sincere memoir of grief and hope that honors Irish folklore while giving modern medicine its due.
Irish-American journalist Tracey explores the perplexing disease that has plagued at least four generations of his family.
The debut author considers himself a “genetic near miss” from schizophrenia. Two of his four sisters, his uncle, his grandmother and her grandmother before her were all “away with the fairies,” as the Irish describe those suffering from mental afflictions. Tracey narrates with innocent pain his sisters’ worst episodes: Chelle strutting down the aisle naked at Mass, informing the shocked congregation that Jesus Christ was her husband; Austine lunging toward another sister’s boyfriend with a kitchen knife. After his mother’s sudden death, the author turned to booze and drugs before anticipating his own crack-up and getting sober. A chance meeting with a London doctor revealed that during his lost period he had missed headlines announcing “the discovery of the world’s first gene link for schizophrenia”—in his ancestors’ very own County Roscommon. Inspired to learn why Ireland has been such fertile ground for schizophrenia and how this gene settled into his bloodline, he headed to his homeland. Chapters describing his visit offer a guidebook to Irish madness, from Celtic fairy caves to the infamous asylum at Ballinasloe to the healing well at Gleanna-a-Galt. Tracey met with the epidemiologist who discovered the gene abnormality, with people from Schizophrenia Ireland and the Hearing Voices Network, and with villagers who perhaps shared his DNA. The causes of schizophrenia are still not well understood, he writes, but four of the most common links—emigration, famine, substance abuse and older fathers—are frequently aspects of the Irish experience. Nonetheless, the Irish are not more genetically predisposed to insanity than any other nationality. Though the long historical passages are interesting, they could have been better integrated with the more compelling and immediate family narrative.
A sincere memoir of grief and hope that honors Irish folklore while giving modern medicine its due.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-553-80525-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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 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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