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case, the fact that she was an honor student with a full social life caused her parents and teachers to overlook withdrawn or bizarre behavior.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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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