Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors
By Lisa Appignanesi
Norton, 535 pp., $29.95
This excellent history of madness in women - its definition, diagnosis, and treatment - begins with erotic descriptions of religious ecstasies and demonic possessions; proceeds through the introduction of asylums for the insane, the treatment of nerves and hysteria, the fashion for hypnosis, the glamour of psychoanalysis, the trends in eating disorders; and concludes with our present infatuation with the quick fix of psychopharmacology.
The mix of environmental, biographical, and physiological causes and cures changes over time, as patients and doctors respond to the intellectual currents of their age. Lisa Appignanesi captures the spirit of the times and correlates it with the modes of madness and cure. Most remarkable are her elegant and compassionate descriptions of suggestible patients, often dependent, passive women who come to produce, through a combination of calculation and the wish to please, the symptoms and language their doctors desire. Along with brief and thorough biographies of the healers - Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud, Jung, Jacques Lacan - are compelling case histories of the dramatically and famously mad - Mary Lamb, Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolfe, Sylvia Plath.
The Ginseng Hunter
By Jeff Talarigo
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 192 pp., $21.95
"What kind of animal kills the person who feeds him? . . . What kind of person . . . after feeding him turns around and sells him?" The kinds of people who appear in this grim and haunting novel do these things and worse. Set on the Tumen River, a border between North Korea and northeast China, the novel relates the story of the ginseng hunter as an innocent boy, a young man coming of age, and a man of experience.
Trained by his father and uncle to search for ginseng root in the forest near his home, the boy grows adept at his trade but remains innocent of the world. His family barely subsists from one brutal winter to the next, following the disastrous agricultural policies of Chairman Mao. But, unlike their North Korean neighbors, they survive.
The wretches attempting to cross the river from North Korea are fleeing starvation, forced reeducation, or execution. Choosing one kind of fear for another, they prefer being hunted and killed to remaining at home and starving. Of Korean extraction himself, the ginseng hunter is sympathetic to the desperate Koreans seeking refuge and rescue in China. He does what he can, which is something, but it is never enough. As he attempts to save a few of the miserable who cross his path, he grows weary of the task and aware of his own compromises. To try and fail is sad; to try and fail, becoming hardened and corrupt in the process, is tragic.
Greetings From Bury Park
By Sarfraz Manzoor
Vintage, 269 pp., paperback, $13.95
Sarfraz Manzoor, a Pakistani growing up in London, suffers the immigrant's dilemma: how to hang on to the old traditions and at the same time blend into the new culture. The interesting twist here is that Manzoor finds his way into British culture through the music of Bruce Springsteen, a working-class American.
The son of a striving, overworked, and underpaid factory worker, Manzoor is constantly pressured to succeed. "Every meaningful conversation during my childhood . . . could all be summarised into one statement: do not let me down. Do not forget the sacrifices I made to come to this country, to bring you here. Do not forget where you come from and who you are." Manzoor cannot reject where he comes from, but he can invent who he wants to be by listening obsessively to Springsteen's music and lyrics and watching American movies: "The Breakfast Club," "Back to the Future," "Rambo."
Manzoor is disarmingly frank about his love for all things American and his worship of the Boss. He travels repeatedly to the United States to attend Springsteen concerts and touch the hand of his idol. After 9/11 Manzoor cancels a trip to America but a year later lands without incident at JFK to hear Springsteen perform with a Pakistani qawwali singer. "I found that Bruce Springsteen gave me more persuasive answers than Islam." In college he refers to himself as a disciple of Bruce and considers starting a band named "Yasser Arafat and the Ayatollahs of Love." In his 30s, having achieved a good measure of success, Manzoor accepts his religion and his adopted country as true parts of himself. This outcome, which is grudging and not altogether convincing, hardly matters. The open confessional tone, simple declarative sentences, and uninflected direct emotions produce a memoir that feels touching and true.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.
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