A moving, passionate personal narrative of trauma and healing.
A woman reconnects with her schizophrenic brother when he reappears in her life after a 20-year absence in this debut memoir, written with novelist Jones (Choke Hold, 2017, etc.).
Call Richmond Jr. disappeared from Greenville, Georgia, just days after his mother died from an overdose in 1977. He’d recently dropped out of Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, and was thought of as a “cheerful but disturbed and misunderstood young man”; at the time, he’d not yet been diagnosed with schizophrenia. For the next two decades, he became a drifter, hopping trains and making rare contact with his family members, never divulging his whereabouts. His 1997 return to Greenville was as abrupt as his departure had been. Schaper, Call’s sister, received a telephone call from her mother-in-law, who told her that Call was on her doorstep. The memoir recalls the author’s efforts to help her sibling, including taking him to the barber and clipping his “half inch too long” toenails, making sure that he had the right medical care, and getting him set up in an apartment. Schaper filmed each of her meetings with him, which she incorporated into an award-winning 2012 documentary, A Sister’s Call. In this book, she reflects on those events and charts her own search for catharsis. Her writing expresses her unfaltering, sisterly devotion and her will to understand her brother: “I decided I had to be his voice until he was able to find his own.” The author addresses the stigma of mental illness head-on, even detailing how her own family was wary of Call. At the same time, she’s open about growing up with an abusive father who suffered from PTSD and a mother who, like Call, experienced auditory hallucinations, which she tried to suppress with alcohol. The book also addresses the hereditary component of mental illness when Schaper’s daughter is diagnosed with an eating disorder. The power of this memoir lies in the way it demystifies mental health issues by examining them from a deeply personal perspective. Individuals and families facing similar experiences will certainly find solace from it. (Includes black-and-white family photos.)
A moving, passionate personal narrative of trauma and healing.Pub Date: April 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9992771-4-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Grey Hawk Productions Inc.
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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
