Nathan (Pornography, 2007, etc.) claims that the subject of the 1973 international bestseller, Sybil by Flora Schreiber, and the blockbuster film that followed, was a deliberate fabrication that not only fooled a mass popular audience but shaped the practice of psychiatry, opening the door to mass hysteria and misdiagnosis.
The author first made her mark in 1995 with Satan's Silence, an exposé of hysterical complaints that young children were being abused by Satanists and false charges of ritual child abuse—allegations that were apparently substantiated but proved to be false. Her latest book illuminates how the American cultural climate that made the claims seem credible had been shaped by the earlier mythological account of a young woman with 16 alternate personalities, who suffered from a multiple personality disorder brought on by her mother's brutally abusive treatment. Before the publication of Sybil, the number of diagnosed cases was in the hundreds, while afterward the number jumped to around 40,000. While the Sybil story began to come under attack in the ’90s despite attempts to hide the subject's real name (Shirley Mason) and disguise her hometown, the strength of this book is the way in which Nathan re-creates the context in which this blatant literary fraud succeeded—the frustrations faced by ambitious young women post–World War II and the drugs then used to treat mental patients in the ’50s, many of whom were women. The author explores the co-dependent relationship between Mason and her exploitative psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur, which began in 1947 and continued intermittently until their death. While Mason became increasing disoriented by drugs administered by Wilbur, the psychiatrist claimed that she was revealing multiple personalities. Her collaboration with Schreiber, to whom she gave falsified clinical records, brought her celebrity while continuing the victimization of Mason. A nuanced, not-entirely-unsympathetic account of the women who perpetrated a sensational literary fraud.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6827-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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