While some readers may view this account as too raw and self-obsessive, it stands as a vivid depiction of mental illness.
A wrenching account of a difficult upbringing and a chaotic brain that will leave readers marveling at the author’s endurance.
Prairie Schooner assistant editor Montgomery (English/Bridgewater State Univ.; Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide, 2017, etc.) has tackled the subject of madness in poetry (Regenerate: Poems of Mad Women, 2017) and in her award-winning doctoral dissertation, which grew into this book. Portions of the book first appeared in the literary journals the Rumpus and the Normal School. The author offers a gripping picture of the real pain and suffering of someone diagnosed with chronic mental illness. Diagnosed with severe anxiety at an early age, Montgomery was serially medicated, or overmedicated, with Celexa, Xanax, Zoloft, and Buspirone; add to that some four years of talk therapy. Later, other diagnoses included PTSD and OCD. “The waiting game will continue for many years,” she writes, “as I bounce from medication to medication, searching for something that won’t injure my body so much, something that will let me off my knees.” The author’s memoir is rich with details about her troubled family, led by problematic parents who were quick to detect sprouting anxiety symptoms in their offspring and who, over the years, adopted multiple dysfunctional children. Whether by nature or nurture, Montgomery seems almost to have been doomed to an existence marked by mental illness. Her revelations about her own experiences lead to discussions of how thinking about mental illness has evolved. She offers a brief look at the expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, some history of the treatment of females, once labeled with hysteria and thought to be suffering from wandering wombs, and a discussion of once-used asylums. The author is clearly concerned with how anxiety disorders, depression, and other mental disorders have been—and are currently—regarded in our culture.
While some readers may view this account as too raw and self-obsessive, it stands as a vivid depiction of mental illness.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5486-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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