by Vincent Blade Douglas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2018
A detailed first-person account of one man’s mental illness that leaves big questions unanswered.
In his debut memoir, Douglas recalls his life-altering week as a patient in a psychiatric ward.
“Some 50 years ago, I was introduced to the worlds of psychedelics and psychic phenomenon,” Douglas writes. “It did not end well.” As a young man, he thought of himself as a “bright bundle of promise.” By his mid-20s he had obtained a master’s degree in education and was working as a senior systems analyst, but he was unhappy with his life and embarked on a journey into what he terms “magic” using psychedelic drugs, yoga, and mind control. He eventually found himself on a downward spiral that led him to drive himself to a hospital, where he was given a shot of Thorazine, and woke up in a closed psychiatric ward feeling “weak and scattered.” Begun within six months of his release and rewritten during the next couple of years, this memoir offers a day-by-day account of his hospital stay, carefully detailing his thoughts, from the notion “I’ll never get better. I’ll never leave the ward” to the paranoid fantasy that he “would be changed to a female.” Douglas admits that he wrote much of the account while “still delusional and still hallucinating” but had an “inner need” to finish it. He describes his hallucinations in vivid detail, including one in which he attempted to escape the ward and felt that he was viewing his pursuit from above: “As if from a great distance, I watched several doll-like figures running back and forth, crisscrossing from one side of the corridor to the other. My world went sideways. It was as though I were watching all of this running and activity from a great height, perhaps as much as 4 or 5 stories up.” Such accounts can become repetitive, and phrases such as “on the other hand” recur with nagging frequency. The book also would have benefited from better framing of his experiences. Douglas says his week on the ward “would drastically affect the rest of my life,” but it’s never quite clear how, and he says little about how he perceives his hospital stay 50 years later. Absent that kind of reflection, this book may interest those with similar experiences, but for others it will prove uncomfortable reading.
A detailed first-person account of one man’s mental illness that leaves big questions unanswered.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982214-68-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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IndieBound Bestseller
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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