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OUT OF HER MIND

Name: OUT OF HER MIND
Author: Rebecca Shannonhouse
ISBN: 0-679-60330-1

WOMEN WRITING ON MADNESS

edited by Rebecca Shannonhouse ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2000

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A well-chosen collection of some of the finest women’s writing, both fiction and nonfiction, on madness, reflecting the horrifying ways over the years that the condition has been defined and treated. The anthology, with an informative introduction by freelance writer Shannonhouse, runs the gamut from The Book of Margery Kempe (1436) to Allie Light (1999). The intervening 19 pieces—essays, letters, excerpts from fiction’share a common, if dispiriting, thread. Whether the diagnosis is chemical in origin, a current favorite, or anatomical—women’s sexual organs were once blamed for what was called hysteria—treatment has been obtuse and often cruel. Very few seem to have understood, or even listened to, the symptoms or the painful experiences these women were relating. Margery Kempe went “out of her mind” after her child was born, had to be forcibly restrained, but regained her sanity through religious beliefs, becoming a noted mystic. 19th-century social worker Dorothy Dix observed women in New England that were not so fortunate. Some were kept in cages, others whipped, and those thought to be sufficiently docile were auctioned off at an annual sale in which local citizens were paid to house them. As excerpts from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Mary-Jane Ward’s The Snakepit, and Light’s —Thorazine Shuffle— show, doctors, nurses, and therapists seem hardly more enlightened: Patients could not refuse medication even if it made them feel terrible, and, as part of her therapy, Light had to walk with a book on her head to improve her posture. Particularly affecting are Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s —The Yellow Wallpaper——both an anatomy of disorder and a portrait of a suffocating marriage—and —Searching for Mercy Street,— Linda Gray Sexton’s painful reminiscences of her poet mother’s breakdowns. Not a day-brightener, but a stirring anthology of the best and most searing writings that brightly illuminate the dark side of so many women’s lives.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-679-60330-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Modern Library

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.