| Written by Diana, on 31-12-2006 02:45 |
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MOODS AND MADNESS
..Title: The Outsider - A Journey Into My Father's Struggle With Madness
..Author: Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
..Pages: 288 (paperback)
..Sales Ranking: 31,901
..Summary: "This account reconstructs his father's fate and makes a moving, reconciling tribute to the father's battle against that fate. The emotiveness emerges from Nathaniel's effort to understand how his father delusionally comprehended his descent from a promising academic career in sociology: it was an evermore transmogrifying conspiracy against himself. The physical effort entailed traveling his father's geographical itinerary, from appointments in universities to an anguishing series of hospitalizations, evictions, panhandling vagrancy in Burlington, Vermont, and ultimately death. Nathaniel imaginatively conceives the places held by the people Charles Lachenmeyer knew--from family and faculty peers to a sympathetic fast-food clerk--in the system of 'Thought Control' he had constructed."
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..Title: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
..Author: Kay Redfield Jamison
..Pages: 223 (paperback)
..Sales Ranking: 714
..Summary: "With breathtaking honesty she tells of her own manic depression, the bitter costs of her illness, and its paradoxical benefits: 'There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness.... It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.' This is one of the best scientific autobiographies ever written, a combination of clarity, truth, and insight into human character. 'We are all, as Byron put it, differently organized,' Jamison writes. 'We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities.' Jamison's ability to live fully within her limitations is an inspiration to her fellow mortals, whatever our particular burdens may be."
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..Title: Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness
..Author: Greg Bottoms
..Pages: 207 (hardcover)
..Sales Ranking: 21,175
..Summary: "There's no false sentiment in this unflinching memoir of a family that's alienated, instead of united, by tragedy: 'We all hid from each other,' Bottoms writes with characteristic candor. 'We shared a space, a roof, nothing else.' There is, however, tremendous sorrow for a blighted life and the havoc that it wrought. Bottoms's finely crafted prose offers no consolation or easy answers--simply emotional precision and the satisfaction of hard truth."
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..Title: Out of Her Mind: Women Writing on Madness
..Author: Rebecca Shannonhouse
..Pages: 208 (hardcover)
..Sales Ranking: 163,256
..Summary: "Ever since doctors first labeled their female patients "hysterical," women have occupied a unique place in the world of mental illness. Whether harboring a dark mood or suffering from a crippling mental illness, such as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or manic depression, a select few of these women have deftly rendered the psychological turmoil that has touched their lives in writing that ranks among the most intriguing and emotionally compelling in American literature."
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Last update: 30-09-2007 08:03
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