Old and new ideas commingle as a writer comes to terms with her bipolar disorder.
A lawyer and mental health advocate describes recent skirmishes in her decadeslong battle with bipolar disorder and offers advice on managing the condition.
After two memoirs, Cheney offers 65 swiftly moving personal essays that suggest the rapid cycling through moods that her disorder causes. Her reflections recap and update the story of the disasters she described in Manic and The Dark Side of Innocence: “serious run-ins with the law, immense amounts of alcohol, multiple suicide attempts, demolished relationships, financial ruin (mania’s costly gift),” and, eventually, a mental hospital where she spent “three unimaginably long years and multiple rounds of electroshock therapy.” The author describes how she has learned to manage her condition with therapy and medication, especially so-called “atypical anti-psychotics,” along with tactics of her own devising. To subdue problems like mania-induced lust, she carries a list of “ten sacred rules” to follow when a manic episode nears, the first of which is: “Don’t change into something sexier. Wear granny panties and flats.” Vivid as such material is, the impact is undercut by the disjointed, nonchronological structure of the book. A dozen or so pages after feeling enraged by the “cluelessness” of an internist who questioned whether she needed all of her medicines, Cheney tries in another essay to go off an antidepressant. Was the doctor right? Were the incidents related? The author doesn’t say. She also blurs the line between reminiscence, self-help, and advocacy as she explores topics such as hypomania and mental health stigmas in brief sections that serve up, mostly uncritically, the kind of health boilerplate found on websites for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies. Cheney can’t have anticipated the criticism the CDC has faced during the pandemic, but her too-easy acceptance of medical-establishment orthodoxies is at odds with the original voice heard elsewhere in the book. The author includes a helpful resource list.
Old and new ideas commingle as a writer comes to terms with her bipolar disorder.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-306-84630-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hachette Go
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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