A troubling and illuminating collection.
An expansive set of interviews and essays that offer a unique perspective on mental health.
Hall, a professional therapist, a former psychiatric patient, and the author of Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs (2011), has been interviewing patients and therapists on his Valley Free Radio show, “Madness Radio,” for a decade. This book assembles more than 60 of those interviews with patients, therapists, and mental health activists who share their very personal and often poignant experiences with psychiatric drugs, hospitalization, and the social stigma of mental illness. The collection is broad and inclusive in its subject matter, as evidenced by chapter titles such as “Meaning in Voices,” “Art and Madness,” “Crash Course in Urban Shamanism,” and “Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic.” The variety in this volume is equally notable; readers will learn much about autism, attention deficit disorder, and bipolar disorder and about controversial treatments, such as electroshock therapy. The book also delves into other issues, such as the disturbingly large number of mentally ill prisoners. Hall’s interview questions are sensitive and perceptive, and the answers that he receives are frank and sometimes sobering. If there’s a central theme to the collection, it’s that drugs and hospital confinement may sometimes be employed excessively or unnecessarily. Eleanor Longden, a researcher at the University of Liverpool, observes, “Psychiatric drugs are designed to inhibit emotion. Yet strong emotion can actually be part of the healing process; learning to fully tolerate, experience, and express it.” Activist, writer, and artist Mel Gunasena, a former psychiatric patient, attests, “When I came out of hospital I had to do a complete detox.…I ultimately healed myself mainly through diet, vitamin and mineral supplements, resolving my trauma, and through friends and family support. Not psychiatric intervention.” Hall’s own emotional essay, “Letter to the Mother of a Schizophrenic,” sums up his focus on the humanity of his subjects: “Again and again I am told the ‘severely mentally ill’ are impaired and incapable, not quite human….[W]hen I finally do meet the people carrying that terrible, stigmatizing label of schizophrenia, what do I find? I find a human being.”
A troubling and illuminating collection.Pub Date: April 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9965143-0-9
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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