An inspiriting but meandering account of mental illness.
Hulbert’s memoir recalls his struggle with bipolarity and the strength he found in religion.
Debut author Hulbert was born in 1944 in Southern Cross, Australia. At 16, crushed by heartbreak, he decided to devote himself to the quest for eternal life as understood by the Catholic Church and eventually joined the Christian Brothers. However, at 20, he suffered his first mental collapse, an experience he believed was triggered by the mortification of giving an unspectacular presentation before a room of his peers. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent the next 27 years living productively. Eventually, however, he had another breakdown. This time, he was diagnosed with chronic bipolar disorder, which he most likely struggled with since his adolescence. The author was besieged by manic delusions of grandeur, twice convinced he was the Messiah. He underwent electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment that only succeeded in inducing a listless indifference to life. Repeatedly, Hulbert sought guidance from his Christian faith and solace in the love offered by his wife and son. The author covers an eclectic range of subjects, including an account of his moral objections to abortion and summaries of some of the nearly 1,000 spiritual stories he claims he’s written. Hulbert’s confessional candor is admirable, and he makes a powerful case for the possibility of flourishing with bipolarity. However, this strangely rambling recollection is so disjointed it ultimately becomes hard to follow. There are countless lists produced of his favorite singers, songs, authors, teachers, and instrumentalists, only to name a few. He sometimes refers to himself in the third person and peppers the text with numerically driven boasts. Apparently, he may have saved 950 souls from purgatory and picked up 3,800 Facebook friends in five weeks.
An inspiriting but meandering account of mental illness.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-0530-9
Page Count: 218
Publisher: XlibrisAU
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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