2024 the best mind review
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(as of Oct 23, 2024 19:52:15 UTC - Details)
A revelatory look at how poet Allen Ginsberg transformed experiences of mental illness and madness into some of the most powerful and widely read poems of the twentieth century.
Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl” opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness.
In Best Minds, psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother’s devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them.
Though madness is often linked with hardship and suffering, Ginsberg’s showed how it could also lead to profound and redemptive aesthetic, spiritual, and social changes. Through his revolutionary poetry and social advocacy, Ginsberg dedicated himself to leading others toward new ways of being human and easing pain.
Throughout his celebrated career Ginsberg made us feel as though we knew everything there was to know about him. However, much has been left out about his experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother, his visions, and his psychiatric hospitalization.
In Best Minds, with a forty-year career studying and addressing trauma, Weine provides a groundbreaking exploration of the poet and his creative process especially in relation to madness.
Best Minds examines the complex relationships between mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry, and prophecy—using the access Ginsberg generously shared to offer new, lively, and indispensable insights into an American icon. Weine also provides new understandings of the paternalism, treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s.
In light of these new discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his achievements, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable.
ASIN : B0B6273TTT
Publisher : Fordham University Press; 1st edition (March 28, 2023)
Publication date : March 28, 2023
Language : English
File size : 24753 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 442 pages
Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Madness As A Personal And Social Exploration
Review: Very well written consideration of Ginsberg, the man, and his major works. Dr. Weine had an ongoing relationship with the poet and social revolutionary which serve as the basis for this thoughtful investigation of Ginsbergâs impact on American and literary culture.
Reviewer: Kindle Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Best Minds
Review: This book is a gem as "psycho" biography of Allen Ginsberg by a psychiatrist who writes with the soul of a poet. The prose is crisp, focused, and unique. There's a lot of information about Allen and his mentally ill mother that I didn't know. For example, Ginsberg gave consent for his mother's lobotomy.The author is pitch perfect in taking an "Oedipal" type story (although the book thankfully doesn't use Freudian jargon) and re-telling it as the birth of the poet as a young man challenged by his mother's and his own inter generational madness. Ginsberg is portrayed transmuting his suffering into poetry, mentoring, teaching, and social activism. This is an honest portrait of a courageous journey through madness.A must read for any creative individual and/or for those interested in the history of the Beats.