Shock

Dukakis and Tye, Larry. Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy. New York: Penguin 2007. Print.

First Sentences:

 

There is no treatment in psychiatry more frightening than electroconvulsive therapy. It works like this: Two electrodes are strapped to the patient's skull. The doctor presses a button that unleashes a burst of electricity powerful enough to set off an epileptic-like convulsion. The sheer strength of the seizure shocks the brain back into balance.

 

There also is no treatment in psychiatry more effective than ECT. 

Description:

 

Wow! Those are some mighty strong, challenging first few sentences which launch into Kitty Dukakis' (with Larry Tye) memoir of her depression, addictions, and Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) treatment. Her book is Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy. And in a world where I, along with probably many other people, only have knowledge of ECT (commonly referred to as "Electroshock") from films like The Snakepit, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and A Beautiful Mind, I felt it would be interesting to learn the facts behind this seemingly scary procedure and the patients who receive it. 

 

In those films, ECT is often used as a punishment rather than as a real treatment, nefariously meant to be administered to a recalcitrant patient. Results were portrayed as similar to a lobotomy, making patients passive, submissive, and quiet.

It was the medical madness of an earlier era, a remedy forever equated with thrashing limbs and obliterated memories. Now, at the same Harvard teaching hospital where Kitty Dukakis gets her treatment, twenty patients a week volunteer for shock therapy....Today [2007] the number of Americans getting ECT each year is almost 100,000 and growing.

The reality presented by Dukakis' spellbinding recollections of her personal ECT experience helps readers understand that this treatment can be highly beneficial for a great number of patients suffering from depression, suicidal thoughts, and addictions. Shock presents Dukakis' honest, often powerful recollections of her decades-long journeys into addiction (diet pills and later alcohol), overwhelming depression, and suicidal thoughts, as well as her experiences with various psychologists and prescribed medications. 

 

Dukakis first became addicted to diet pills when she was very young to achieve her mother's image of a slimmer daughter. She also received a tremendous energy boost from these daily tablets. Later, as she tried to kick that addiction, she began to rely on alcohol to blot out her overwhelming depression about her appearance. 

She soon lacked any of her former commitment to social programs, volunteering, and even family, remaining in bed for days, and was regularly found passed out in her vomit. As a governor's wife, she realized she was a danger to her politician husband, Michael's, campaign for president, but was helpless to overcome her mental illness.

[In 1988] I stopped showing up at my office. I spent all day at our duplex....I got up in the morning, waited for Michael to leave, then canceled all my appointments. I headed straight to the liquor cabinet in the dining room, carried the bottle into the kitchen, poured out three or four ounces of spirits, and gulped it down. Then I grabbed a newspaper or magazine, went upstairs, drew the blinds, unplugged the phone, and read for the ten minutes it took me to pass out. When I got up two hours later, I did it all again. 

When ECT was suggested to her as a last resort, she naturally was hesitant. But after undergoing her first treatment on her 38th wedding anniversary, she immediately felt lighter, less stressed, and with enough energy to go home that same day. She continued the normal series of five ECT treatments spread over the next weeks, finding she was much improved mentally for about eight months. After that time, she then began a new series. This became her regular pattern over the rest of her life.

 

There is one predictable drawback faced by Dukakis and other ECT patients: memory loss. Sometimes it is only portions of minor memories that are lost only for a few weeks. But for other patients, the loss might be of more important events and permanent. Dukakis completely forgot a romantic trip she took with husband Michael to Paris. Re-enacting that vacation, even staying in the same hotel and eating at the same restaurants, did not jog a hint of the old memory.

 

But that same memory loss side effect also included forgetting about those areas that troubled her into depression. She no longer could remember why she was insecure about her image and personality, could not conceive of the causes of her depression, nor remember her flawed behavior when under the influence of diet pills and alcohol.    

Co-author Tye, in alternate chapters, delves deeply into the historical background of these mental illnesses and ECT treatment, including its discovery and testing in 1938 (which first included putting patients into a medical coma). Tye interviews  doctors, psychiatric hospital staff, and patients themselves, presenting a well-rounded picture of individuals and research involved with these paralyzing and all-encompassing mental illnesses, as well as the changes brought about by ECT. He also examines the extreme backlash from many doctors, teaching hospitals, and public organizations who vocally denounce and actively work against the benefits of ECT.

 

Of course, as published in 2007, the medical treatments and advances in ECT presented in Shock make some data, both for and against ECT, possibly dated. But regardless, the confessions of Dukakis and others, her struggles, and her triumphs over crippling mental illness cannot be discounted.

 

I was swept away by her candid narration as well as Tye's medical and personal interview and research to provide a more clear picture of ECT and its affect, good and bad, on its patients. There were fascinating facts and personal assessments of this treatment on every page. 

I know it sounds strange to go on and on about this controversial treatment. But Dukakis' book is a must read for anyone interested in depression, addictions, psychiatric treatments, and impacts of individuals suffering from mental illness.

How one of the most reviled psychiatric procedures is fast becoming one of its mainstays is an astounding yet untold chapter of American medical history. 

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of All Maladies  

In-depth research into the medical history and current status of all forms of cancer, treatments, and patients. Fascinating.

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 475 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

 

Tracks

Davidson, Robyn. Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback. New York: Vintage. 1980. Print.

First Sentences:

 

I arrived in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars and a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes....A freezing wind whipped grit down the platform and I stood shivering, holding warm dog flesh, and wondering what foolishness had brought me to this eerie, empty training station in the centre of nowhere. 

Description:

With personal challenge and survival memoirs, I always try to imagine whether I could achieve what the author accomplished. Almost always the answer is a resounding "No, not in my wildest dreams." That is even more obvious while reading Robyn Davidson's magnificent journey, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback.

 

Davidson is just an ordinary Australian-born young woman with no special skills or ambitions...except for a persistent desire to walk across the Australian outback desert, alone, with only camels and her dog as her companions. Yes, that's right. She will walk on foot, not ride the camels, for 1,700 miles, making her "lunatic idea" (her words) even more impossible-sounding.

 

So she takes a train from her home in Queensland to the bleak outback town of Alice Springs, where men are men and women stay home. There she hoped for the first time to actually even see a camel and then learn how to manage them by herself. 

 

She began to work for a domineering man who captured and tamed wild, feral camels that roam the outback. Taking on the lowest position on his ranch, she agreed to work for free in exchange for camel-training experiences and, at the end of eight months, be given three of his camels for her expedition. Not all goes according to this plan, however.

 

Eventually, off she goes, with her two camels, following old desert roads, trails, and open terrain from one feeding spot to another, hoping local information about watering holes is correct and the rumored tiny settlements are still active and places where she can get rest and advice along the way.

I knew [people] all had that sinking feeling that they would never see me alive again, and I had the sinking certainty that I would have to send messages from Redbank Gorge the same day, saying, "Sorry, muffed it on the first seventeen miles, please collect." 

Along with her faithful dog, Diggity, and occasionally a photographer from National Geographic magazine, the source of her funding and eventual article, she slowly walks, gaining rhythm, confidence, and power in her aloneness. Wild, unpredictable camels, numerous hardships, and the vast desert all around her. What could possibly go wrong?

We were breaking camp at four in the morning, walking until ten, resting in the shade until four, then continuing until eight at night....Living on one's nerves and expecting every moment to produce a horrendous catastrophe is one thing -- doing it in 130-degree heat is quite another. Hell must be something like that. 

Along the trek, she encounters wild camels ("If you see one, shoot it first -- immediately" is the advice given her), snakes, dried up water holes, abandoned villages, as well as friendly, generous people and moonlit skies that kept her dream alive.

 

I really enjoyed reading her clear, honest prose as she recounts adventure after challenge, or just the boredom of putting one foot in front of the other mile after mile. It is a powerful, yet simple read, one that should be enjoyable to anyone seeking an insight into the beauties and threats of the Australian Outback desert, and the perseverance of one woman who tries to live in it.

It struck me then that the most difficult thing had been the decision to act, the rest had been merely tenacity....One really could do anything one had decided to do whether it were changing a job, moving to a new place, divorcing a husband or whatever, one really could act to change and control one's life; and the procedure, the process, was its own reward.

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders.   

One woman's quest to trace the route of Marco Polo through China, Tibet, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, India, and other countries...by bicycle. Wonderful descriptions of her journey, the land, and the few people she encounters in the vast, mostly unsettled mountains of Asia. (Previously reviewed here.)

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 475 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

Cowboys Are My Weakness

Houston, Pam. Cowboys Are My Weakness. Berkeley, CA : Washington Square Press 1992. Print.

First Sentences:

When he says "Skins of blankets?" it will take you a moment to realize that he's asking which you want to sleep under. And in your hesitation he'll decide that he wants to see your skin wrapped in the big black moose hide. He carried it, he'll say, soaking wet and heavier than a dead man, across the tundra for two -- was it hours or days or weeks?


Description:

I admit I first picked up Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness, simply based on the title. But after only the first few sentences and paragraphs, I was deeply hooked by the relationship descriptions conveyed in her deft, personal writing style.

These are stories of love, each narrated by a woman who isn't afraid to take chances with questionable men and enter into challenging situations. Her writing is so packed with penetrating evaluations of her environment and the people she encounters, honest hesitations over choices to be made, questionable decisions settled on, and then unblinking acceptance of consequences that I felt author Houston was telling deeply-felt episodes from her own life to me, her confidential friend. 

Houston's stories include:

• Hunting with a boyfriend for six weeks as he leads paying customers to locate, shoot, and bring back trophy big horn sheep ... and she hates hunting, never having ever even shot a gun much less killed any animal. Not to mention the miles slogging on her belly to sneak up on unsuspecting sheep; 

• Deciding to winter camp in -30 degree weather to ward off the blues, despite never having camped in sub-zero weather, having poor equipment, and only two freezing dogs as companions;

• Rafting down an impossible river that the local park ranger said was too high to run, leaving at night and unable to see the killer rapids throughout their adventure, aware that only the day before on the same river a similar boat had capsized, killing one experienced rafter;

• Watching her best friend deal with repeated cancer diagnosis; hosting a mother who doesn't like her boyfriend's tattoos or lifestyle; tending a horse with a lame tendon (after hitting a gopher hole while she was riding and being thrown over his head and concussed); and working her way through cowboy after cowboy, each with great affection for her, wonderful physical attractiveness and attentiveness, but each carrying a warning sign of some aspect (previous girlfriend he can't leave, possible pregnancy decisions, and just plain old reluctance to stick around and change his lifestyle) that always threaten her deep feelings for each man.

It's her writing that is supurb: thoughtful, concise, emotional, and always honest to her inner most feelings. Whether describing her connections to her dogs, horses, men, or women friends, her stream-of-consciousness narration is always clear and open, revealing her deepest and sometimes not so deep feelings on every page.

There are multiple relationship decisions facing her protagonist in every story, such as:

• She said the wild ones were the only ones worth having and that I had to let me do whatever it took to keep him wild. She said I wouldn't love him if he ever gave in, and the harder I looked at my life, the more I saw a series of men--wild in their own way--who ...I tamed and made them dull as fence posts and left each one for someone wilder than the last;

• I thought about all the years I'd spent saying love and freedom were mutually exclusive and living my life as though they were exactly the same thing;

• There was something about the prairie--it wasn't where I had come from, but when I moved there it just took me in and I knew I couldn't even stop living under that big sky. When I was a little girl....I used to be scared of the flatness because I didn't know what was holding all the air in.

• After the first week in Alaska I began to realize that the object of sheep hunting was to intentionally deprive yourself of all the comforts of normal life.

• [On waking up after surviving a -30 night of winter camping] The morning sunshine was like a present from the gods. What really happened, of course, is that I remembered about joy.

I absolutely loved every story, character, setting, and writing style in each of these short stories. It's one of the few books that I could pick up immediately and re-read, certainly one title that will go into my Forever Library collection. 

I sincerely hope you pick it up and enjoy the trials and joys of relationships, whether with men, women, or animals, as I have and will continue to do in the future.

A relationship, you've decided, is not something you need like a drug, but a journey, a circumstance, a choice you might make on a particular day.

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:]

 

Ehrlich, Gretel. The Solace of Open Spaces.

Wonderfully powerful, personal, and highly descriptive essays of rural life on a sheep ranch and other very small town locales in Wyoming.

 Happy reading.

Fred

Click here to browse over 470 more book recommendations by subject or title (and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

My First Hundred Years

Murray, Margaret. My First Hundred Years. London: William Kimber 1963. Print.

First Sentences:

I always think that an autobiography should begin with some account of the forebears and immediate family of the writer so that one can understand some of the early influences which have affected the writer and have helped to make him what he is. My ancestral tree is a very short one going back to only one set of great-great-grandparents, about two hundred. I have quite undistinguished lineage...

Description:

I sought out Margaret Murray's autobiography My First Hundred Years after reading The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilivie, and discovered Murray was a contributor of more than 5,000 entries to the original Oxford English Dictionary. The words and definitions she sent to the editors (after the call went out to the general public for assistance in finding new items), focused on India where she was born and spent much of her life, as well as her field of Egyptology and also witchcraft. Better still, I found OED contributor Murray had written her autobiography at age 100, something I felt would be extremely interesting to peruse.

And she did not disappoint. Her memory is remarkable for a centenarian (or for anyone for that matter), and her writing style exquisite: free-flowing, descriptive, chatty, and full of interesting details of life as a woman archeologist in that very new field.

Born and raised in Calcutta, India, to wealthy parents, Murray was educated in London where she became interested in archeology, a class she only had taken on a whim. The professor, Sir William Petrie, a pioneer of the new field of Egyptology, took Murray under his wing. She edited and illustrated his writings, eventually accompanying Petrie to Egypt as a site nurse. There she absorbed his methods and discoveries at various sites and soon grew to be a qualified archeologist in her own right. She became a teacher of Egyptian linguists and translator of hieroglyphics at the University of London.

What I loved about her recollections was her attention to details and personal feelings. She related memories of the visit to India of the Prince of Wales, where attending Maharajahs competed to out-dazzle each other in their dress. For example, the Maharajah of Patiala wore a coat with "fronts, color, cuffs, and hem embroidered with gold thread and peals, [and] round his neck he wore at least four graduated rows of diamonds, the longest reaching nearly to his waist."

Her early home life included eating with small silver cutlery (larger ones were never adopted by her father) and, at the end of the meal, having the visiting servants of the invited diners carefully frisked for any valuable spoons they might have pocketed. Her mother encouraged a broad education without focus on a single subject, a technique that so limited Murray's brilliant sister Mary she never could focus on one skill and thus was unable to rise to her potential in piano, mathematics, or language. Murray also recalled tales of the horrific Indian Mutiny as related by her grandmother.

As an Egyptologist, Murray translated inscriptions found in tombs, uncovered a major temple to Osiris constructed by the Pharaoh Seti I, and was the first woman to unwrap an Egyptian mummy. 

Murray later became an ardent supporter of women rights and suffrage, including pushing for acceptance of women in academia and archeology. She expanded her on-going interest in folklore to include witchcraft, a topic on which she wrote many books as well as the entry for the Encyclopedia Britannica on that topic.

Hers was an amazing life, one that is now available to lucky readers to delve into the world of nineteenth century India and twentieth century (and centuries-earlier) Egypt. I was totally fascinated to "listen" to her recall story after story, detail after detail, of the worlds she knew and was eager to share. A lively, lovely story of an important woman's world and achievements. 

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Ogilivie, Sarah. The Dictionary People.    

Carefully details the lives of those people from the general public who contributed words, definitions, and sources for terms to be included in the original Oxford Dictionary. (previously reviewed here)

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 465 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

Beautiful Ugly

Feeney, Alice. Beautiful Ugly. New York: Flatiron. 2025. Print.

First Sentences:

 

If all we need is love, why do we always want more? I dial her number. Again. Finally she answers.

Description:

I think Alice Feeney is one of my favorite "soft" thriller writers. Author of the twisty, gripping books Sometimes I Lie and Rock, Paper, Scissors among others, she takes ordinary people, often couples, and explores their personalities, relationships, dreams, and foibles that lead them into very tense, maybe threatening situations. No ax murders here, just edge-of-your-seat, something-funny-is-going-on-here, don't-know-what's-behind-that-door-that-I'm-about-to-foolishly-open kind of situation found on every page.  

 

Feeney's newest thriller, Beautiful Ugly is another fantastic read, full of sudden surprises, quirky characters, unexpected plot twists, and slightly unnerving settings. It opens with an author, Grady Green, talking on the phone with his wife while she is driving home to see him. She suddenly says she sees a body in the road and tells Grady that she us going to stop to help. Grady warns her not to get out of the car, to stay safe, but she gets out anyways. That is the last she is heard from by Grady or anyone else.

One year later, Grady is struggling. He desperately misses his best friend, his wife. He cannot afford mortgage payments on their house, so has moved into a cheap hotel while trying to write the second novel he is contracted to produce (and, of course, has already spent the advance).

Fortunately, Grady's publishing agent has inherited a small "writing cabin" from a former writer/client on a remote island in Scotland. She feels Grady needs a quiet environment to produce his required novel, and the cabin might be just what he needs. She will sponsor him with her own money for a few months in hopes he can free himself from his block and produce a new book.

But once settled into the luxurious cabin, Grady makes a discovery that might change his fortune, despite the far-ranging risks involved. While considering which path to follow, he begins to notice strange things about the island and its people. With no phone coverage, no internet, and no way of communicating with the non-island world, Grady soon feels an unease that makes him question his sanity.

All this happens in the first few pages, so I am not giving away the plot twists that unfold from this point. Alice Feeney is the master of characters glimpsing things out of the corner of their eyes, reading questions into seemingly ordinary situations, and misinterpreting everyday conversations. 

All this leads to a very tense, unputdownable story. It only reveals its secrets in the final pages, and even then there are several completely unpredictable revelations.

I really enjoyed letting this plot, characters, and environment engulf me completely. Pick it up if you like to follow a lead character who experiences ambition, confidence, questions, suspicion, anger, love, and uncertainty in his life among an unusual village full of quirky townspeople (whom he cannot quite figure out if they are crazy or he). 

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Feeney, Alice. Sometimes I Lie.   

A woman wakes from a coma without any memory of how she got there or anything about her past few months. She cannot talk or move, so people visiting her do not know she can hear them. Slowly from their conversations and foggy memories, she begins to piece together the incidents that led to her hospitalization and current situation...and not everything she learns is positive. (Previously reviewed here.)

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 470 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).