A poignant account with an optimistic conclusion, if not a happy ending.
One family’s struggle against the ravages of schizophrenia.
Award-winning Independent Iraq correspondent Patrick Cockburn (Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq, 2008, etc.) and his 26-year-old son Henry, a diagnosed schizophrenic, collaborate to tell the story of battling an acute mental illness. In 2002, Henry was a British college student who appeared to be happily launched on an artistic career until—without any obvious precipitating cause—he began to hear voices that prompted him to endanger his life by wandering naked in winter, plunging into icy water and engaging in other dangerous activities. Believing that he was undergoing an exhilarating religious experience, he avoided taking anti-psychotic medications and engineered daring escapes from the various mental institutions where he was being held in protective custody against his will. The author writes movingly about the harrowing times faced by the family as they awaited his recapture, fearful for his life and safety. Henry recounts his experiences on the run, hooking up with a variety of street people and sometimes simply wandering through fields getting battered and bruised, facing hunger and inclement weather. Although his grandmother suffered from depression, there is no known family history of schizophrenia. A heavy user of marijuana in his teens, he describes his life during adolescence as “a sort of haze.” His parents had tolerated his marijuana use, believing the drug to be “fairly harmless,” and only learned during his hospitalization of “its possible devastating impact on somebody genetically predisposed to schizophrenia.” By 2007, Henry had come to terms with the realities of his situation and accepted medication. In 2009, his condition had stabilized sufficiently to allow him to move to a rehabilitation unit in a London suburb, an institution that offered greater personal freedom, although he still contends with hallucinatory experiences.
A poignant account with an optimistic conclusion, if not a happy ending.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5470-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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
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
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