Tell Me Who You Are by Louisa Luna
Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: free space. Ok I will get to my thoughts about this book in a second. But… It’s probably been talked about before by folks in other spaces but I find it notable that so many female-written thrillers are based around a woman running away from her past. Could be because of an abusive ex or parents but it is often — as it is here — about a traumatic event that occurred when they were younger. I’m not trying […]
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
The Debutante: From High Society to White Supremacy by Jon Ronson
I’m sitting on….three other reviews at the moment. But over the course of three or four days, I listened to these audio books, and everything else has been put on hold. I came to these books through a bit of a circuitous route. Jon Ronson was interviewed on the podcast Knowledge Fight, a podcast that critically explores the world of Alex Jones. Ronson has long written about both white supremacy and conspiracy theories, and Alex Jones is firmly planted at the nexus of those two […]
The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
When I read Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan’s memoir about her experience with psychosis, I became a little obsessed with it. (The Netflix adaptation was disappointing, as the clever hook in the book was her investigating her own illness from an outside perspective, something she could do as she lost most of her memory from when she was sick. The film just follows it straight. But that’s a digression.) Brain on Fire is an extremely readable memoir about a very scary and rare thing that […]
Doctor Elizabeth Ford is a psychiatrist who has worked on and overseen the prison hospital psychiatric wards at Bellevue Hospital in New York since 2000. In this memoir, Dr. Ford describes the conditions, staff and patients in these wards as well as her own personal journey in working with them. Much of what she describes is frustrating and tragic: the lack of space and consistent treatment for those in need, seeing the same prisoners cycle back into her wards over and over, stories of individual […]
What a peculiar little book. I happened to be browsing through the stacks at the local public library, and came across it. The title caught my eye, and then I saw it was authored by a psychiatrist with whose work I am familiar in the area of catatonia. I did not expect to find a book on this topic written by a well-known professor of psychiatry tucked away amongst the more popular titles. My confusion only grew when I actually read the book today, as […]
