An unvarnished look at the destructiveness of mental illness, as told by a person who suffered at the hands of someone...
The heavy-hearted memoir of a woman who lost her mother and daughter to the bitter grip of mental illness.
Mental illness not only ravages those who suffer from it; it devastates their families as well. A developmental psychologist, Pruchno (Challenges of an Aging Society, 2007, etc.) is in a unique position to write about living with a person afflicted by a disease of the mind. Her mother committed suicide in 1975 after struggling with manic depression. Then, in a cruel twist of fate, her adopted daughter, Sophie, was eventually diagnosed with three illnesses: ADHD and bipolar and borderline personality disorders. Penned in a vivid, literary style that bleeds anguish, Pruchno’s story is a mother’s worst nightmare—raising a deeply troubled girl whose self-destructive tendencies led to risky sex, drugs and suicidal thoughts, despite efforts to help her. Pruchno recounts in tortuous detail Sophie’s downward spiral and how constant strife and anxiety robbed the family of any sense of normalcy. After Sophie was allegedly raped at age 11 by a camp counselor, her emotional swings carried increasingly dire consequences, including an aborted pregnancy at 16 and hospitalization in a psychiatric unit. The most shocking parts of the book are transcripts of Sophie’s online chats with a man whom she met for sex. While the author’s candor can be suffocating at times, Pruchno believes too many families struggle in secret. She hopes her experiences will spark a national dialogue on the damage mental illness inflicts on families. When Sophie turned 18, the author was forced to let her go to find “rock bottom”—a decision Pruchno intellectually accepted as necessary, though she agonized over the loss of her little girl. Since the book centers on a young person and leaves such a powerful impression, it would make a solid supplementary text for a college psychology course. Pruchno’s feelings of desperation and powerlessness speak more to the reality of mental illness than an academic case study ever could.
An unvarnished look at the destructiveness of mental illness, as told by a person who suffered at the hands of someone else’s demons.Pub Date: March 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4575-2559-9
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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