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PERFECT CHAOS

A DAUGHTER'S JOURNEY TO SURVIVE BIPOLAR, A MOTHER'S STRUGGLE TO SAVE HER

A simultaneously painful and inspiring page-turner.

A no-holds-barred “biography of depression,” based on the alternating journal entries of a mother and daughter.

Cinda Johnson, who directs the special education graduate program at Seattle University, and her daughter Linea, a mental-health advocate and national speaker, jointly chronicle the first five years of Linea's ongoing battle to overcome the ravages of bipolar disorder. First diagnosed while in high school, Linea still battles “anorexia, anxiety, and depression,” but she explains that her episodes are now controllable. “My relationship with bipolar has evolved…My illness is part of me, it is something that affects my life,” she writes, “but it is something, not all. It is not my life; my life is merely affected by it. It does not define me if I don’t let it.” The author and her mother describe the evolution of her disease and the difficult struggle they both faced in coming to terms with it. Even though Cinda trained special-education teachers to deal with mental illness, she found it difficult to accept it in her own daughter, a popular high-achiever whose goal was to become a professional musician. This is a gritty account of what it is like to be down in the trenches with mental illness—fighting suicidal thoughts, battling the aftereffects of shock treatment, dealing with medication and its side effects and resisting the temptations of alcohol and street drugs. While Linea was battling for sanity, Cinda and her husband faced the difficult challenge of balancing their desire to protect their daughter with the need to respect her privacy and freedom. Ultimately, it was Linea who decided to give up her career aspirations, move back to Seattle from Chicago, where she had been attending college, advocate for the mentally ill and work to “create a world free of stigma.”

A simultaneously painful and inspiring page-turner.

Pub Date: May 8, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-312-58182-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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