A family portrait of astounding depth and empathy.
One family’s history reveals the mystery of schizophrenia.
In a riveting and disquieting narrative, Kolker (Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, 2013) interweaves a biography of the Galvin family with a chronicle of medicine’s treatment of, and research into, schizophrenia. Don and Mimi Galvin had 12 children—10 boys and two girls—born between 1945 and 1965. Religious beliefs—both parents were Catholic—were not the only reason for their fecundity. Mimi seemed to crave the distinction of “being known as a mother who could easily accomplish such a thing.” In addition, Kolker speculates, the children may have assuaged an abiding feeling of abandonment, including by a husband more focused on his career than his family. Mimi was a perfectionist who controlled every aspect of the children’s lives: chores, enriching after-school activities, and feelings, which she believed should best be repressed. Insisting that they were raising a model family, the Galvins refused to acknowledge problems, such as violent fights among the older brothers, which the parents dismissed as merely roughhousing. The other brothers felt lost, ignored, “less than safe, treated like a number and not a person.” The eldest, Donald, was the first to exhibit signs of schizophrenia, with bizarre behavior that repeatedly landed him in mental hospitals; soon, five brothers followed, all with the same diagnosis, manifested somewhat differently, including sibling sexual abuse. Meanwhile, Mimi pretended everything was normal—until she could not hide the family’s suffering. With each diagnosis, “she became more of a prisoner—confined by secrets, paralyzed by the power that the stigma of mental illness held over her.” Kolker deftly follows the psychiatric, chemical, and biological theories proposed to explain schizophrenia and the various treatments foisted upon the brothers. Most poignantly, he portrays the impact on the unafflicted children of the brothers’ illness, an oppressive emotional atmosphere, and the family’s festering secrets. By the 1980s, the Galvins became subjects of researchers investigating a genetic basis for the illness; those extensive medical records inform this compelling tale.
A family portrait of astounding depth and empathy.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54376-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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