Dandy Books--Theme: Mental Illness

Dandy Books is a meme I began about books that are on my TBR list. They are mostly older books not necessarily from the current year. Hopefully I can make your list bigger!

We were learning about mental illnesses in my psychology class recently and I got really interested in reading books about that so here are this weeks dandy books dealing with those topics:

Lowboy by John Wray ---I really really really want to read this book about schizophrenia

Early one morning in New York City, Will Heller, a sixteen-yearold paranoid schizophrenic, gets on an uptown B train alone. Like most people he knows, Will believes the world is being destroyed by climate change; unlike most people, he’s convinced he can do something about it. Unknown to his doctors, unknown to the police—unknown even to Violet Heller, his devoted mother—Will alone holds the key to the planet’s salvation. To cool down the world, he has to cool down his own overheating body: to cool down his body, he has to find one willing girl. And he already has someone in mind. Lowboy, John Wray’s third novel, tells the story of Will’s fantastic and terrifying odyssey through the city’s tunnels, back alleys, and streets in search of Emily Wallace, his one great hope, and of Violet Heller’s desperate attempts to locate her son before psychosis claims him completely. She is joined by Ali Lateef, a missing-persons specialist, who gradually comes to discover that more is at stake than the recovery of a runaway teen: Violet—beautiful, enigmatic, and as profoundly at odds with the world as her son—harbors a secret that Lateef will discover at his own peril. Suspenseful and comic, devastating and hopeful by turns, Lowboy is a fearless exploration of youth, sex, and violence in contemporary America, seen through one boy’s haunting and extraordinary vision.

Night Navigation by Ginnah Howard --about manic depression and addiction

Night Navigation opens on a freezing, rainy night in upstate New York–the kindling gone, the fire in the woodstove out. Del’s thirty-seven-year-old manic-depressive son, Mark, needs a ride, but she is afraid to make the long drive north to the only detox that has a bed. Through the four seasons, Night Navigation takes us into the deranged, darkly humorous world of the addict—from break-your-arm dealers to boot-camp rehabs to Rumi-quoting NA sponsors. Al-Anon tells Del to “let go”; NAMI tells her to “hang on.” Mark cannot find a way to live in this world. Del cannot stop trying to rescue him. And yet, during this long year’s night, through relapse and despair, they see flares of hope as Mark and Del fitfully, painfully try to steer toward the light.
Told in the alternating voices of an addict and his mother, this riveting novel adds new depth to our understanding and our literature of parents and their troubled children.

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression --sounds totally fascinating


The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policymakers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has had on various demographic populations around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness.

Failure to Zigzag by Jane Vandenburg

Vandenburgh makes a brilliant debut with this startlingly idiosyncratic, intelligent, funny and painfully moving novel. In Southern California in the late '50s and early '60s, Charlotte, daughter of wackily schizophrenic Katrinka, struggles in the toils of family madness for a normal life. When Katrinka repairs to mental hospital, Charlotte stays with her stodgy, repressive and yet crazily eccentric Republican grandparents, who provide little more fertile ground to flourish than did Katrinka, who, for all her charm and energizing wit, is surpassingly wretched as a mother. When Katrinka enters into a brief, improbable marriage, Charlotte is schlepped along to live an unkempt, disordered life in blue collar Redondo Beach and then, gypsy-like, in an Airstream mobile home while her mother works as a circus ventriloquist. With consummate artistry and by subtle indirection, the talented author reveals courage, misery and despair through sharp, flip dialogue, evoking the reader's empathy


Thoughts?