A compelling coming-of-age follow-up to Manic.
Cheney (Manic: A Memoir, 2008) writes with brutal honesty about her tumultuous childhood trapped in the clutches of the “Black Beast”—her metaphor for the out-of-control emotional states she now recognizes as early-childhood bipolar disorder.
The author begins with a disturbing incident that occurred when she was seven. When her brother refused to relinquish his seat at the dinner table, she rammed a fork through his hand. In answer to her father's query about her violent behavior, she answered honestly, “he made me do it.” In Cheney’s mind, “he” referred not to her brother but to the monster, who “lived inside my heart and head, leaving little room for hope or joy or any emotion lighter than sorrow.” The author was only diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her late 30s. Even though she had been jailed, hospitalized and suffered a series of broken relationships, she had managed to conceal her aberrant behavior and lead an apparently successful life as an entertainment attorney. In her debut memoir, Cheney chronicled her time in college and the years that followed; here she examines her childhood and adolescence for keys to the onset of her disorder. Despite the fact that an estimated 800,000 American children have been diagnosed as bipolar, the author explains that it is easy to confuse with other mental ailments such as ADHD, or even to simply overlook it. “Given the inherent volatility of childhood and the volcanic eruptions of adolescence, how can you tell when it's bipolar disorder?” she writes. “Early-onset bipolar disorder is notoriously difficult to diagnose.” In Cheney’s case, the fact that she was an honor student with a full social life caused her parents and teachers to overlook withdrawn or bizarre behavior. By exploring her past, she hopes to make parents and educators more aware of the problems that young people may be secretly trying to deal with.
A compelling coming-of-age follow-up to Manic.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7621-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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