A mother wrestles with the advent of her son’s schizophrenia and its long, painful unfolding.
Not quite 30 now, the eponymous Ben has weathered many storms within his mind and attempted to calm them with drugs and booze. By mother Kaye’s account, he’s normal in some ways—he “loves nature, children, fantasy video games, helping others, the Indianapolis Colts, Thanksgiving with the family, and vegetarian Thai food.” Yet it is in the nature of schizophrenia to overturn all that is normal, introducing terror into the lives of those who suffer from it—and those who live with them. Kaye details multiple episodes of madness requiring hospitalization, five times in 2003 alone, each of them calling for resourceful response; but, as she writes, no one in her family quite knew what to do or how to respond. Ben is in remission now, but, Kaye adds, there is no “cure” for schizophrenia, and even as Ben feels the weight of his illness, his “family feels isolated, stigmatized, and often very alone.” The author does not play the pity card; indeed, sometimes her prose can seem a touch too matter-of-fact. She is eminently helpful, particularly in the matter of self-medication, which so many of the mentally ill prefer to taking the medications that have been prescribed for them. And for good reason: In a table toward the end of the book, Kaye lists the many excuses for “medication noncompliance,” with entirely reasonable causes such as “they don’t like side effects (weight gain, sexual performance, sedated feeling)” and “fear of becoming medication-dependent.” The author’s wariness and weariness come through, but so does her optimism that, with adherence to his regime of medication, her son can one day hold a job, attend school and perhaps even live on his own. From a literary point of view, Kaye’s account pales next to Patrick Cockburn’s Henry’s Demons (2011), but it’s heartfelt and surely of help to those new to living with mentally ill loved ones of their own.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4422-1089-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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