The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity
10 best books like The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity (Mark Vonnegut): Fates Worse Than Death, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, The Loony-Bin Trip, Fire in the Brain: Clinical Tales of Hallucination, Rae: My True Story of Fear, Anxiety, and Social Phobia, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness, Bedlam: A Year in the Life of a Mental Hospital, Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street, A Circle of Children
| Author | Kurt Vonnegut |
| ISBN | 0425134067 |
"An anthology in which Vonnegut freely quotes himself on everything from art and architecture to madness and mass murder...Uncompromising."--Los Angeles Times
"Honest and scarily funny, and it offers a rare insight into an author who has customarily hidden his heart."--New York Times
Here...
| Author | William Rodney Allen |
| ISBN | 0878053581 |
Kurt Vonnegut says: "I've worked with enough students to know what beginning writers are like, and if they will just talk to me for twenty minutes I can help them so much, because there are such simple things to know. Make a character want something-that's how you begin." William Rodney Allen teaches...
| Author | Kate Millett |
| ISBN | 0252068882 |
this is my second time around, after many years, and i still find this books exceptional. first of all, kate millett writes beautifully. this woman's had many careers -- artist, activist, feminist theorist, writer -- but if her talents resided only in putting words in sequence and saying amazing things...
| Author | Ronald K. Siegel |
| ISBN | 0452269539 |
A beautiful pianist hears her music drowned out by the voice of God. A young woman calmly watches the gang rape of her girlfriend and herself. A shy schoolboy turns to his invisible best friend to wreak bloody vengeance. In Fire in the Brain, Ronald K. Siegel shows how even the sober brain can create the...
| Author | Chelsea Rae Swiggett |
| ISBN | 0757315275 |
Rae is beyond socially awkward.
Since she was a little girl, Rae Swiggett knew something was different about her. The sound of planes flying overhead could spark a panic attack. Being called on in class was enough to push her over the edge. She feared the unknown, life, death, people . . . even...
| Author | Marguerite Sechehaye |
| ISBN | 0452011337 |
This is an astonishing memoir of a young woman called only "Renee," whose descent into schizophrenia began at the age of five. Written with a diamond-sharp precision that lends it an eerie power, it tells the story of Renee's long sojourn in what she calls the "Land of Enlightenment" or "The Country of...
| Author | Jack El-Hai |
| ISBN | 0470098309 |
The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, M.D., who saw a solution in lobotomy,...
| Author | Dominick Bosco |
| ISBN | 1559721138 |
This is a novel that NEEDED to be written, and Dominick Bosco has done an incredibly fine job of it.
He has had a compassionate and lengthy sabbatical studying health care for the mentally ill at first hand, and presents the whole panoramic sweep of it.
From multiple points of view - in...
| Author | Lee Stringer |
| ISBN | 0671036548 |
In the underground tunnels below Grand Central Terminal, Lee Stringer -- homeless and drug-addicted over the course of eleven years -- found a pencil to run through his crack pipe. One day, he used it to write. Soon, writing became a habit that won out over drugs. And soon, Lee Stringer had created one...
| Author | Mary MacCracken |
| ISBN | 0451165527 |
From the back cover:
"This is the story of a teacher with a listening heart who learned how to understand her children's private hells of anger, confusion, hurt, and tragic loneliness. It is the inspiring, ultimately triumphant story of her no-holds-barred war against the darkness of their...
| Author | Andy Behrman |
| ISBN | 0812967089 |
Electroboy is an emotionally frenzied memoir that reveals with kaleidoscopic intensity the terrifying world of manic depression. For years Andy Behrman hid his raging mania behind a larger-than-life personality. He sought a high wherever he could find one and changed jobs the way some people change...
The Day the Voices Stopped
| Author | Ken Steele |
| ISBN | 0465082270 |
For thirty-two years Ken Steele lived with the devastating symptoms of schizophrenia, tortured by inner voices commanding him to kill himself, ravaged by the delusions of paranoia, barely surviving on the ragged edges of society. In this inspiring story, Steele tells the story of his hard-won recovery...
| Author | Linda Gray Sexton |
| ISBN | 1607477610 |
Despite experiencing the agony of witnessing her mother’s multiple suicide attempts, the last of which was successful, Linda Gray Sexton found herself gripped by the same strong tentacles of mental anguish. Falling into the familiar grooves of her mother’s relentless depression, Sexton tries...
| Author | Bill Ayers |
| ISBN | 0142002550 |
Bill Ayers was born into privilege and is today a highly respected educator and community activist. In the late 1960s he was a founder of the militant activist group the Weather Underground. Living on the run, stealing explosives, and hiding from the law, Ayers was involved in the defining moments of...
| Author | Greg Bottoms |
| ISBN | 0226067645 |
A taut, powerful memoir of madness, Angelhead documents the violent, drug-addled descent of the author's brother, Michael, into schizophrenia. Beginning with Michael's first psychotic break—seeing God in his suburban bedroom window while high on LSD—Greg Bottoms recounts, in gripping,...
| Author | Ned Zeman |
| ISBN | 1592405983 |
f you've never had problems with clinical depression, I can tell you from hard experience that it sucks. It's painful physically and emotionally. It's economically disastrous since it makes it very hard to work regularly. It's life-threatening. It turns the world into a muddy gray place that you are...
A Brief History of Anxiety...Yours and Mine
| Author | Patricia Pearson |
| ISBN | 1596912987 |
A bold new view of anxiety from an unerringly smart and funny writer who has suffered from it her whole life. The millions of Americans who silently cope with anxiety at last have a witty, articulate champion in Patricia Pearson, who shows that the anxious are hardly “nervous nellies†with...
Speaking of Sadness: Depression, Disconnection, and the Meanings of Illness
| Author | David A. Karp |
| ISBN | 0195113861 |
Combining a scholar's care and thoroughness with searing personal insight, Karp brings the private experience of depression into sharp relief, drawing on a remarkable series of intimate interviews with fifty depressed men and women. By turns poignant, disturbing, mordantly funny, and wise, Karp's...
Should You Leave?: A Psychiatrist Explores Intimacy and Autonomy--and the Nature of Advice
| Author | Peter D. Kramer |
| ISBN | 0140272798 |
In his phenomenal bestseller Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer explored the makeup of the modern self. Now, in his superbly written new book, he focuses his intelligent, compassionate eye on the complexities of partnerships and why intimacy is so difficult for us. With the art of a novelist and the...
