An unvarnished look at the destructiveness of mental illness, as told by a person who suffered at the hands of someone...
The heavy-hearted memoir of a woman who lost her mother and daughter to the bitter grip of mental illness.
Mental illness not only ravages those who suffer from it; it devastates their families as well. A developmental psychologist, Pruchno (Challenges of an Aging Society, 2007, etc.) is in a unique position to write about living with a person afflicted by a disease of the mind. Her mother committed suicide in 1975 after struggling with manic depression. Then, in a cruel twist of fate, her adopted daughter, Sophie, was eventually diagnosed with three illnesses: ADHD and bipolar and borderline personality disorders. Penned in a vivid, literary style that bleeds anguish, Pruchno’s story is a mother’s worst nightmare—raising a deeply troubled girl whose self-destructive tendencies led to risky sex, drugs and suicidal thoughts, despite efforts to help her. Pruchno recounts in tortuous detail Sophie’s downward spiral and how constant strife and anxiety robbed the family of any sense of normalcy. After Sophie was allegedly raped at age 11 by a camp counselor, her emotional swings carried increasingly dire consequences, including an aborted pregnancy at 16 and hospitalization in a psychiatric unit. The most shocking parts of the book are transcripts of Sophie’s online chats with a man whom she met for sex. While the author’s candor can be suffocating at times, Pruchno believes too many families struggle in secret. She hopes her experiences will spark a national dialogue on the damage mental illness inflicts on families. When Sophie turned 18, the author was forced to let her go to find “rock bottom”—a decision Pruchno intellectually accepted as necessary, though she agonized over the loss of her little girl. Since the book centers on a young person and leaves such a powerful impression, it would make a solid supplementary text for a college psychology course. Pruchno’s feelings of desperation and powerlessness speak more to the reality of mental illness than an academic case study ever could.
An unvarnished look at the destructiveness of mental illness, as told by a person who suffered at the hands of someone else’s demons.Pub Date: March 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4575-2559-9
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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