Fortunately for everyone who has been affected by bipolar disorder, Griffiths—and her notebooks—survived the journey.
A visceral account of the turmoil experienced within a manic-depressive breakdown.
Griffiths (A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World, 2014, etc.) is a dedicated recorder of her experiences. "My notebooks have always been very precious to me,” she writes, “and I travel with them wrapped, waterproofed, closer to me than my passport or money. They are footprints of my thoughts, tracks of journeys, curiosity-paths and desire-lines." What she writes in these notebooks eventually becomes stories, essays, and books, but the notebooks have also provided her with a space to try and make sense of her own mind. Griffiths, a winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, has bipolar disorder and can be susceptible to periods of mania and depression, the risk of both being heightened by exhaustion and stress. In this book, the author explores the period of time after a lengthy book project left her depleted. She was aware of being at risk of a mental break but far enough into it by the point of realization that treatment became exceedingly difficult. However, she was determined to capture as much of it as possible: the "honey on the razor's edge" of being able (or unable) to see things in new ways, hear music differently, ride the rapids of a torrent of ideas and thoughts. Griffiths is a skilled writer who ably harnesses this flood of emotions and thoughts, and her descriptions of the mania and depression are never unwieldy. There were countless times when she could have stopped writing, but Griffiths saw it through, exploring all the places her mind traveled: Greek and Roman views of mental health, the roles of friends and pets, the failings and lifelines of psychotherapy. Eventually, in order to get out of her own head and “see far horizons again,” she set out on the 800-kilometer Camino de Santiago in Spain.
Fortunately for everyone who has been affected by bipolar disorder, Griffiths—and her notebooks—survived the journey.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-726-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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
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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