An illuminating look at the dangerously unstable and the systems that control them.
In this book, a clinical psychologist uses examples from case histories to unravel the mysteries and dramas of patients whose crimes have resulted in their incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
During the latter half of the 1990s, Sternberg served on the staff of the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in New York City. Kirby, a maximum security hospital that opened in 1985, consolidated about 160 patients from a number of other New York facilities, all of them forcibly committed. Some of Kirby’s residents were placed there because they had been found incompetent to stand trial. These inmates generally only remained a short time, receiving counseling and medication to render them capable of participating in their own defense. The author’s main focus is on the other category of Kirby inmates, those who pled “not guilty by reason of insanity.” These patients avoided prison terms in favor of commitment to a high-security mental facility like Kirby. Some, Sternberg points out, may have, often unwittingly, exchanged fairly short prison sentences for what could ultimately be a lifetime of psychiatric incarceration. Changing the names and recognizable details, the author uses the case histories of four long-term patients to explore the basic questions at the foundation of the text: “Who are these people? What are they like? How did they come to be that way? What have they done? And why?” The resulting narrative is an intriguing and informative examination of not only the lives and progressive disintegration of those deemed criminally insane, but also the legal system that led to their incarceration and the ironies and absurdities that permeated their treatments. Sternberg’s writing is lucid and his stories absorbing. Most of the book will be highly comprehensible to lay readers. But the text occasionally slips into academic verbiage that slows its momentum, such as a description of a patient’s damaged sense of self as “to one degree or another adequate or lacking in cohesion and integration based largely on the contingencies within his interpersonal world.”
An illuminating look at the dangerously unstable and the systems that control them.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-94-909359-9
Page Count: 292
Publisher: IPBooks
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 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.
