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
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
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