"What a delight to find seventeen of Saroyan's uncollected stories within one cover!....charming tales, all blessed with Saroyan's pixieish imagination and magical writing style....Even today they read as though they have been freshly minted from the Saroyan treasure house. A discovery for those who love Saroyan's fiction; his spark is still wonderfully alive." --Library Journal
Who was Elizabeth Tuttle? In most histories, she is a footnote, a blip. At best, she is a minor villain in the story of Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the greatest American theologian of the colonial era. Many historians consider Jonathan Edwards a theological genius, wildly ahead of his time, a Puritan hero. Elizabeth Tuttle was Edwards’s “crazy grandmother,” the one whose madness and adultery drove his despairing grandfather to divorce. In this compelling and meticulously researched work of micro-history, Ava Chamberlain unearths a fuller history of Elizabeth Tuttle. It is a violent and tragic story in which anxious patriarchs struggle to govern their households, unruly women disobey their husbands, mental illness tears families apart, and loved ones die sudden deaths. Through the lens of Elizabeth Tuttle, Chamberlain re-examines the common narrative of Jonathan Edwards’s ancestry, giving his long-ignored paternal grandmother a voice. Tracing this story into the 19th century, she creates a new way of looking at both ordinary families of colonial New England and how Jonathan Edwards’s family has been remembered by his descendants,contemporary historians, and, significantly, eugenicists. For as Chamberlain uncovers, it was during the eugenics movement, which employed the Edwards family as an ideal, that the crazy grandmother story took shape. The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle not only brings to light the tragic story of an ordinary woman living in early New England, it also explores the deeper tension between the ideal of Puritan family life and its messy reality, complicating the way America has thought about its Puritan past.
In this powerful, sometimes harrowing, deeply felt story, Patrick Tracey journeys to Ireland to track the origin and solve the mystery of his Irish-American family's multigenerational struggle with schizophrenia. For most Irish Americans, a trip to Ireland is often an occasion to revisit their family's roots. But for Patrick Tracey, the lure of his ancestral home is a much more powerful need: part pilgrimage, part investigation to confront the genealogical mystery of schizophrenia–a disease that had claimed a great-great-great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and, most recently, two sisters. As long as Tracey could remember, schizophrenia ran on his mother's side, seldom spoken of outright but impossible to ignore. Devastated by the emotional toll the disease had already taken on his family, terrified of passing it on to any children he might have, and inspired by the recent discovery of the first genetic link to schizophrenia, Tracey followed his genealogical trail from Boston to Ireland's county Roscommon, home of his oldest-known schizophrenic ancestor. In a renovated camper, Tracey crossed the Emerald Isle to investigate the country that, until the 1960s, had the world's highest rate of institutionalization for mental illness, following clues and separating fact from fiction in the legendary relationship the Irish have had with madness. Tracey's path leads from fairy mounds and ancient caverns still shrouded in superstition to old pubs whose colorful inhabitants are a treasure trove of local lore. He visits the massive and grim asylum where his famine starved ancestors may have lived. And he interviews the Irish research team that first cracked the schizophrenic code to learn how much–and how little–we know about this often misunderstood disease. Filled with history, science, and lore, Stalking Irish Madness is an unforgettable chronicle of one man's attempt to make sense of his family's past and to find hope for the future of schizophrenic patients. From the Hardcover edition.
It is a book about how to overcome generations of dysfunctional family behavior. Readers reflect on how their childhood experiences may be negatively affecting their choices and relationships as adults.
Family conflict can wreak havoc on people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. A Way Out of Madness offers guidance in resolving family conflict and taking control of your life. The book also includes personal accounts of family healing by people who were themselves psychiatrically diagnosed. Contributors include: Patch Adams, M.D., inspiration for Robin Williams film Joanne Greenberg, author, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden David Oaks, director, MindFreedom International Will Hall, co-founder, Freedom Center
Institutionalizing Gender analyzes the relationship between class, gender, and psychiatry in France from 1789 to 1900, an era noteworthy for the creation of the psychiatric profession, the development of a national asylum system, and the spread of bourgeois gender values. Asylum doctors in nineteenth-century France promoted the notion that manliness was synonymous with rationality, using this "fact" to pathologize non-normative behaviors and confine people who did not embody mainstream gender expectations to asylums. And yet, this gendering of rationality also had the power to upset prevailing dynamics between men and women. Jessie Hewitt argues that the ways that doctors used dominant gender values to find "cures" for madness inadvertently undermined both medical and masculine power—in large part because the performance of gender, as a pathway to health, had to be taught; it was not inherent. Institutionalizing Gender examines a series of controversies and clinical contexts where doctors' ideas about gender and class simultaneously legitimated authority and revealed unexpected opportunities for resistance. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
