All the more effective through its matter-of-fact understatement, as it illuminates mysteries it can’t resolve.
A short, scary and ultimately redemptive recounting of the veteran journalist’s mental breakdown.
While researching his best-selling The Professor and the Madman (1998), the author came to fresh terms with the mystery of his own madness decades earlier, which began when he was a student at Oxford. Before embarking on an Arctic expedition, a rite of academic passage, he found himself engrossed in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. “When I woke five hours later, the whole world seemed to have changed, to have suddenly gone entirely and utterly mad,” he writes. Nothing made sense to him or looked familiar; if it looked vaguely familiar, it seemed threateningly strange. He uncharacteristically fell asleep for another eight hours and awoke to remember that he had an errand to run but had no idea where he was going, why, or even how to start his vehicle. “I swerved off down the road, for a destination unremembered, by way of a route unchartered,” he writes and then tells how he crashed his van 10 minutes later. Things eventually got better, so he didn’t tell anyone before leaving for the Arctic, where things then got life-threateningly worse. He survived, married (almost numbly catatonic at his wedding), launched his journalistic career, raised a family, and still suffered these spells with frightening regularity, a couple times a month, each lasting nine days. Almost by chance, he encountered a doctor who said, “I know what’s wrong with you; and I know how to fix it. Don’t worry anymore. You’ll soon by fine.” And so he was, though the electroshock treatments he received remain controversial and their effectiveness, inexplicable, and his research for his book, after initially providing him with a pat diagnosis, left him with more questions.
All the more effective through its matter-of-fact understatement, as it illuminates mysteries it can’t resolve.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61452-083-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Byliner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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