A brave and honest memoir of mental illness and the many people it can affect.
A popular Portland radio talk show host’s account of her painful marriage to a bipolar man who eventually committed suicide.
When Hamilton met her future husband, David, all she could see was a tall, handsome man who radiated confidence and success rather than the “erratic, discombobulated energy” that governed his actions. Less than a year later, they got married, and Hamilton was pregnant. Their storybook life began to unravel shortly afterward when Hamilton discovered that David had never ended his relationship to the woman who was his previous girlfriend. Rather than leave and jeopardize what she believed would be her infant daughter’s well-being, Hamilton stayed by David’s side. It was then she began to notice his sensitivity to “sounds, bright lights [and] smells” and an increased frequency of irrational outbursts. Yet she never equated his symptoms with any serious illness, in part because David—as well as most of the rest of his family—lived in a state of denial about his condition. Just as she found the courage to finally seek a divorce, David’s condition worsened, and he was hospitalized. But medications only seemed to compound her husband’s problems, and his newly diagnosed bipolar disorder caused him to deteriorate rapidly. During this period, Hamilton learned that David was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and that a divorce from him would cost her everything she had worked for. Before she could take further action, however, David committed suicide, leaving both his wife and child “without so much as a note to understand his decision.” Hamilton’s story is unsettling, but the heart and grit she displays in successfully moving beyond tragedy and learning to live with such chilling uncertainties as whether or not her daughter would also develop bipolar disorder make the book a worthwhile—if at times difficult—read.
A brave and honest memoir of mental illness and the many people it can affect.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-58005-584-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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