Review:
"We believe our response to mental illness is more enlightened, kinder, and more effective than that of the Victorians who built the asylums. Can we be sure? Taylor's somber investigation, calling on personal experience, challenges complacency, exposes shallow thinking, and points out the flaws and dangers of treatment on the cheap. It is a wise, considered, and timely book."--Hilary Mantel
"It is hard to write well enough about this book because it is so good."--Susie Orbach "Independent "
"This superb book combines the experience of the patient and the eye of the historian. Riveting, insightful, and relentlessly honest, it is both social history and memoir, and it makes an important contribution to contemporary debates on the treatment of mental distress."--Darian Leader, founding member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR)
"Eloquent, compassionate, and utterly absorbing. The Last Asylum is the best sort of memoir, transcending the purely personal to confront a larger social history."--Sarah Waters, author of The Paying Guests
"A remarkable memoir-hybrid that opens up history from the inside. . . . A visceral and supremely intelligent account of [Taylor's] breakdown and psychoanalytic treatment in the last years of the asylum system."--Alison Light, author of Common People "Guardian "
"A gripping account . . . as exciting as any adventure story."--Naomi Alderman "Guardian "
"Taylor takes readers on a fascinating if harrowing journey through her four years as an inpatient and outpatient in the British mental health-care system and her two decades in psychoanalysis. Her book offers an unflinching view of those whose illnesses beg a safe haven and whom the system often fails."--Suzanne Allard Levingston "Washington Post "
"Taylor provides a gripping (often painful) account of her own experience of madness, a fascinating description of her psychoanalysis, a historical reflection on the role asylums played for inmates and the implications of their demise, and a meditation of the interrelationships between care and cure."--Los Angeles Review of Books (11/05/2015)
"[A] brave and brilliant memoir. . . . an inside account of being out of one's mind."-- (04/06/2015)
"[An] unsparing portrait of a descent into madness."--Times Literary Supplement (03/27/2015)
About the Author:
Barbara Taylor is professor of humanities at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Eve and the New Jerusalem, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, and, with Adam Phillips, On Kindness.
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