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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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