For Mimi Baird, the book serves as closure; for general readers, it’s a sobering account of how little we knew and how much...
The author was 6 in 1944 when her father, Perry Baird, was remanded to Westborough State Hospital in Massachusetts, diagnosed with manic-depressive psychosis and disappearing from her life. Here, she reconstructs the past in a moving, melancholy memoir.
Though her mother closed the door to information, the emotional longing remained, and in 1994, the author received a manuscript her father had written at Westborough in which he described his illness, what he thought caused it and his experiences as a patient. Thus, using his own words, augmented by letters, medical records and interviews, she sketches the life of a man who had done brilliantly in college and medical school—even co-authoring a paper with the eminent physiologist Walter Cannon—but who would be felled by psychosis. Because he was already showing signs of illness, Cannon advised Baird to practice dermatology to avoid the stresses of a research career. He did well until violent manic episodes mounted and he was returned to the mental hospital. Baird had the prescient insight that his illness was caused by a chemical imbalance, a conjecture made a few years before the discovery of lithium treatment for manic depression. However, for Baird and others in the 1940s, there were only straitjackets, solitary confinement, insulin, electric shocks and, ultimately, lobotomy. Baird fought his treatments, opening restraining knots with his toes, fighting orderlies and physically destroying his cell. Eventually, he went home, but his increasing paranoia and delusions persuaded his family to permit a lobotomy. He died in 1959, drowning in a bathtub following a convulsion. Gratifyingly, his daughter’s synopsis of Baird’s writing published in a psychiatric journal included a reference to her father’s early paper on a biochemical cause of manic-depression. It served as recognition at last, she writes, if only as a footnote.
For Mimi Baird, the book serves as closure; for general readers, it’s a sobering account of how little we knew and how much we still have to learn about mental illness—especially how not to treat it.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0804137478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
PROFILES
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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