An admirable institutional history, and more so, a captivating social history, for what makes McLean distinctive, its style...
A history of America’s best-known insane asylum for the carriage trade.
Though McLean Hospital in Massachusetts became more than a local institution with the treatment of Robert Lowell, the publication of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and later the musical Taylors, it has a nearly 200-year history of psychiatric service. Because the patients were, from the start, well-heeled, it was able to adopt the atmosphere of a literal asylum—a welcoming harbor to weather mental storms, free of the threatening, let alone barbaric, conditions of many such institutions. The stays were often lengthy, the therapy staff-intensive: Here one would receive the rest cure. Boston Globe columnist Beam (The Americans Are Coming!, 1991, etc.) follows the peregrinations of the institution's therapy programs, given the human-interest angle with a clutch of patient and staff histories, from hypothermia therapy and water treatments, purges and bleeding, opium and hashish, through the electric-light bath, the salt glow, and Neptune’s girdle to lobotomies and bracing administrations of electricity. But the emphasis was always on “moral therapy,” engaging the mind with literature and conversation, and exercising the body with sport and the great outdoors, the great outdoors having been shaped here by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. This was to be a home, not a hospital, a mansion, not a ward. Much has changed in the past few decades, writes Beam, with insurance companies no longer amenable to such comfy psychiatric treatment, especially so at nearly $1,000 a day. McLean is busy selling off many of its assets, including its most renowned, the atmosphere—though, as Beam points out, all that moral therapy yielded a pitiful number of measurable results on the scales of mental health.
An admirable institutional history, and more so, a captivating social history, for what makes McLean distinctive, its style and sensibility, is part and parcel of what Boston, as a cultural instance, represents. (Photographs)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-891620-75-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
PROFILES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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