Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness - Hardcover

Bottoms, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609606263 ISBN 13: 9780609606261

Publisher: Crown Pub, 2000

Synopsis

The author's shocking and tender memoir of his own brother's descent into schizophrenia begins with Michael's first "break" in the 1980s and traces his grinding fall into drug addiction and madness. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

"I am on record as believing that any day is better when I am not asked to read another memoir. But Greg Bottoms's book caught my attention immediately and drew me in. I read it all in one sitting. I glanced up once or twice to look out of the window and to clear my head, and then when I finished I looked at the window again but it was dark outside. Which, considering what I'd just finished reading, seemed appropriate.
"I would feel foolish in saying that the book is powerful and well written. . . . That doesn't seem the point somehow. Angelhead is direct, inventive, clearly imagined, and packs a punch. It is a book people will talk about -- perhaps productively."
-- Ann Beattie
"Angelhead is a cleanly distilled story of a profound family anguish. On every one of its two hundred pages there are sentences like arrows. The whole work has the beauty of hard, painful truth, arrived at through intelligence, art, and compassion. This is one of the most moving books I've read in a long, long time."
-- John Casey

"From the Hardcover edition.

From the Publisher:

A heartbreaking work of staggering genius...
GIST: The facts informing this devastating memoir are these: In 1980, Greg Bottoms's older brother Michael dropped six hits of acid at an Ozzy Ozbourne concert and saw God. From that day onward, Michael had a "head full of God." God was in the TV, God was in the microwave (Michael read the setting "300" as "GOD"). Everywhere, everything, was God.

UPSHOT: Like any great work of art, Angelhead reads as if it were written to save the author's life. In that manner, it's a necessary book, one that will undoubtedly make you think about how relatively sane your little life seems. The doctors finally called Michael a "paranoid schizophrenic," but where's the awful beauty in that? Far more interesting is the fire-and-brimstone brilliance of the writing that amounts to the author's own diagnosis. "I'd been sucked into Michael and God and Satan's void," Bottoms writes, "an upside-down world where dreams were as solid as stone. I wanted, for one fleeting moment, to have hallucinated, to have broken through reality's delicate plane and into the world of the insane."

-ESQUIRE

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown Pub
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0609606263
• ISBN 13: 9780609606261
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 207