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Title: The Loony-Bin Trip by Kate Millett ISBN: 0-252-06888-2 Publisher: University of Illinois Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Maybe it's the place I'm in
Comment: Millet carefully unpacks the historical events surrounding her "breakdowns." Her family and many friends think she is crazy to buy a farm and turn it into an artist's retreat. As readers, it's hard to know whether she did or didn't have a breakdown. However, regardless of whether it even can be determined in such a black-and-white manner, we feel an incredible empathy for her as she welcomes us to experience her hurt, her feelings of jealousy and loss, and her moments of profound joy. For anyone who has ever been diagnosed with a mental "disorder," this is a wonderfully affirming book.
Rating: 3
Summary: Fascinating but wordy and pretentious
Comment: I read this book primarily for some insights into the excesses of psychiatry, and found much of that. I was quite surprised how strongly I identified with some of her feelings. Though I have have never had problems of the sort Kate had (has?), I am one of the many who have experienced clinical depression and been treated for it. As I read her book, I noticed how even this minor problem carries a lifetime of suspicion from others. As I go through life, physicians and relatives are quite ready and willing to jump on ordinary feelings as "evidence" that it is happening again, and maybe there is more to it. How oddly must one behave to start the spiral down to the point of something like Kate's experience happening?
Though I felt that Kate really should have known better than to do some of what she did, knowing that others were likely to use them excuses to have her committed, I still felt deeply her fear and helplessness. I was especially disgusted by the attitude of the shrink who failed to get her hauled away in the Bowry only through Kate's quick thinking.
The minuses of this book for me were the many times the she goes into descriptions of artists and other creative types in such exalted terms. Kate left little doubt that, to her, anyone who does other things with their lives are empty shells who rely on the chosen ones (such as herself) to be able to see the world as it truly is. This sort of elitism (how many times does she tell us she is a professor and published writer) and condescension is sickening in someone who spends so much of her life trying to right great wrongs of society.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Loony Bin Trip
Comment: Written between 1982 and 1985, The Loony-Bin Trip is overwhelmingly an effort to revert common notions of depression so that, like "grief," it may be allowed to enter the popular vocabulary. Millet achieves her foremost intent through her undeniably exquisite prose supplanted by already-changing attitudes toward depression among the public. However, The Loony Bin Trip is much more than a diatribe against prevailing stigmas of depression - it is a tender account of a talented, intelligent women's relentless desire to be accepted and understood by her contemporaries. Traumatic accounts and vivid self-reflection can occasionally prompt the most neutral reader into turmoil, thus rendering The Loony Bin Trip a cross-reference somewhere between memoir and horror. Her gut wrenching appeals for sympathy may provoke anger in some readers, reinforcing her real-life role as that of a "crazy" woman, but ultimately, her wealth of writings prove her to be a functional, if not creatively contributing, member of society. Reading Kate Millet's The Loony Bin Trip is a trip in itself. (Review written for Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal," a publication of the Claremont Colleges.
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Title: Sexual Politics by Kate Millett ISBN: 0252068890 Publisher: University of Illinois Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Agents in My Brain: How I Survived Manic Depression by Bill Hannon ISBN: 0812693469 Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 May, 1997 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah ISBN: 0345432134 Publisher: One World Pub. Date: 01 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: An Unquiet Mind by Kay R. Jamison ISBN: 0679763309 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0374248583 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 19 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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