A compelling account of abuse so repellent as to sometimes defy credulity.
Psychiatrist Baer recalls “the most important and deeply fascinating experience of my professional life”—his many sessions with a patient suffering from dissociative identity disorder.
Supplementing his detailed notes with audio and video tapes, drawings, letters and journal entries, the author builds a dramatic, novelistic account of the years he spent treating a woman known here as Karen. Baer first met her in January 1989, when she came to his Chicago office complaining of depression and suicidal feelings. Her periodic losses of memory and her accounts of horrific childhood abuse led the psychiatrist to suspect that Karen had what used to be called multiple personality disorder. After nearly four years of therapy, his suspicions were confirmed when he received a letter from one of her “alters,” a seven-year-old named Claire. Karen then provided him with the names and descriptions of 11 distinct alternate personalities, each with a unique history. At this point, Baer began hypnotizing Karen and guiding her through trances in which more personalities—male and female, young and old—were induced to speak to him. They also sent him drawings and wrote revealing letters, portions of which are reproduced here. Baer then led Karen through an integration process, sometimes guided by advice from an alter. As Karen consolidated these alters, whose function had been to protect her, painful memories emerged, but so did her coping abilities. By 1998, she had integrated them all; however, years of abuse had taken their toll, and she remained Baer’s patient for another eight years. While controversy still surrounds the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, Baer’s account is given weight by Karen’s participation—she verified its accuracy as it was being written and provides a prologue and an epilogue.
A compelling account of abuse so repellent as to sometimes defy credulity.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-38266-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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