An unflinching portrait of the scourge of mental illness.
A father descends into the emotional depths of his daughter’s schizophrenia.
In his debut memoir, Schofield (English/California State Univ., Northridge) provides a brutally honest account of his young daughter, January, whose violent outbreaks crippled their family. January’s behavior worsened upon the arrival of a baby brother. Fearing for the new child’s safety, Schofield and his wife plunged headlong into their newly confused labyrinthine world populated by psychiatric wards, medication and only occasionally competent doctors. January’s shocking behavior took a severe emotional toll on the family, particularly her father, who found himself admitting his dark thoughts. While January was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, the long period of uncertainty left Schofield shaken. After his daughter’s EEG came back normal, the author admits that he was “so desperate for answers that I would actually have been relieved if I’d been told she had a tumor.” This stark honesty characterizes the book, whose author openly admits his complex relationship with his daughter. January’s mental illness soon consumed every aspect of Schofield’s life, spurring marital strife, false charges of sexual abuse and a work-related outburst. It even pushed the author toward a suicide attempt. In a final effort to diffuse the extreme resentment January felt toward her baby brother, the Schofields attempted a wildly unorthodox living situation, which demanded breaking the family apart in an effort to keep it together.
An unflinching portrait of the scourge of mental illness.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-71908-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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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