Good and bad luck accompanies every life but what happens in the end comes from what we have done in the past.
Books of Interest Website: chetyarbrough.blog
“The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley” (A Novel)
By: Hannah Tinti
Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
Hannah Tinti (American author, magazine editor, won the Alex Award for “The Good Thief”.)
Hannah Tinti writes a story about the life of a 21st century American outlaw, Samuel Hawley. He lives a peripatetic life as a robber, former convict, and part time collector for fellow criminals. When acting as a robber, he has few scruples about acting outside the boundaries of civil society. Hawley is a meticulous and practiced gun owner who wanders through America carrying the scars of bullets and a life of violence.
The woman he marries is alleged to have drowned in an accident but is believed by a grandmother to have been murdered by Hawley.
Hawley’s daughter, Loo, doubts the truth of her maternal grandmother’s claim but is faced with reports of her mother being an excellent swimmer, unlikely to be drowned as an accident.
Tinti leads the listener/reader to a conclusion about the drowning that on the one hand seems possible but on the other inconsistent with the complicated history of an American outlaw. Hawley’s moral center is at an extreme end of societal norms but within the boundary of truth and rightness. That truth and rightness suggests he could not have drowned his wife.
The dynamics of childhood are broken when either a father or mother are missing. Each parent contributes something to a child that is different when either are absent. Single parents become both bread winner and nurturer of a child when there is an absent parent. Hawley is a criminal who loves his daughter, idolizes his lost wife, and carries on with a life into which he was born. The peripatetic life of Hawley continues after the death of his wife. Now he is faced with raising a daughter on his own. They travel across the country, never truly becoming a part of one place or another.
The daughter becomes like her father in knowledge and love of guns and their use in America.
She emulates her father’s character by choosing to be in control of what she sees as a transactional world. It is the world her father has experienced and passes on to his daughter. Tinti shows Hawley deeply loves his daughter, grieves and idolizes his lost wife, but only views life as a societal transaction.
What we do in our lives have consequences. Good and bad luck accompanies every life but what happens in the end comes from what we have done in the past. Maybe life is just a transaction.
Being one of “The Best Minds” is of little help in coping with schizophrenia’s symptoms.
Blog: awalkingdelight
Books of Interest Website: chetyarbrough.blog
“The Best Minds” A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
By:Jonathan Rosen
Narrated by: Jonathan Rosen
Jonathan Rosen (Author, Yale graduate–Accepted but dropped out of a PhD English program at Berkeley.)
Jonathan Rosen tells the story of his boyhood and adult friendship with Michael, a boy of his age who excels academically and professionally as a young graduate of Yale. Michael has a mental breakdown in his early twenties. He is diagnosed as schizophrenic. Rosen compares his years of adolescence with Michael’s.
Rosen’s stricken friend excels in every academic and business pursuit he undertakes before his slip into schizophrenia. In reflecting on the boy’s relationship, Rosen explains his perception of himself is as a grade school and high school plodder who prefers literature to math and the sciences. In contrast, Rosen suggests Michael’s academic qualities give him the ability to read, understand, and recite literary and science subjects with the ease of a savant. Michael reads everything with speed and understanding while Rosen labors over his studies.
The irony of Rosen’s perception of himself is that despite their differences, both he and Michael are accepted at Yale.
Rosen becomes an editor of the University’ newspaper, and later, a published author. Michael aspires to the editorship of the Yale paper, tries to become a published author, but is unsuccessful. Before graduation, Michael is recruited by a prestigious publicly held investment firm and seems on his way to great wealth and success. Instead, Rosen explains Michael leaves the investment company and begins to lose his way in life. Michael slips into a schizophrenic state that diminishes his eidetic memory and gives him a combination of debilitating psychological symptoms. At the height of Michael’s illness, he threatens his mother with a knife. With the persuasion of his father, Michael agrees to admit himself to a psychological ward which finally diagnosis his schizophrenia.
Michael, Rosen’s brilliant childhood friend, is admitted to a psychiatric ward for treatment designed to isolate and medicate its patients into a fog of confusion that is designed to lessen paranoid depression.
Rosen’s long introduction of himself and Michael seems prelude to an explanation of the ineptitude of the American psychiatric industry. Michael’s journey is an indictment of the American system of treatment for mental dysfunction. Michael is eventually discharged but is placed in a group home with other patients suffering from mental dysfunction. They share bedrooms with medications designed to isolate and offer palliative care that deadens their psychological symptoms.
Michael continues his treatment with the aid of minimal income from a government disability program that helps pay for his accommodation and psychoanalytic therapy.
He is directed to reengage life by his therapist with work as a clerk at a Macy’s Department Store. Michael’s father is incensed by the therapist’s diminishment of his son’s accomplishments and begins a campaign to have Yale reengage his son in pursuit of a law degree. With the help of Yale’s faculty, Michael is readmitted to the University.
Ironically, the Yale faculty and students become a caring haven that helps Michael cope with his medical condition.
However, Yale’s help is only palliative, not curative. Michael remains schizophrenic, only ameliorated by drugs and the calming influence of Yale students and faculty. His paranoia continues and becomes more severe when his father dies.
Schizophrenia affects only 1% of the population but has a higher risk of contraction from first degree relatives. (Michael’s grandmother was diagnosed with the disease.)
Michael seems on a road toward managed recovery with a detailed intellectual explanation of what schizophrenia is to him and how it creates delusional images that threaten his existence. His intellectual ability to explain his illness to the public attracts book publishers and the film industry to offer him over a million dollars for a book and film about his life. As this financial windfall becomes real, Michael and his fiancé plan to marry.
On June 17, 1998 Michael B. Laudor stabs his pregnant fiancé, Caroline Costello.
In a schizophrenic episode, Michael grabs his fiancé from behind, stabs her several times, and cuts her throat. Michael leaves her to die on their kitchen floor. Rosen notes that Michael quit taking his medication. He lost control in an episode of paranoia that viewed his fiancé as a maleficent alien presence. It seems a recurrence of what happened with his mother when he was thankfully convinced by his father to voluntarily commit himself to a hospital ward.
What becomes increasingly clear in Rosen’s biographical story is that there is no cure for schizophrenia.
Schizophrenic treatment is a life-long process that requires medication and a support system from caring caregivers, both professional and familial. Being one of “The Best Minds” is of little help in coping with schizophrenia’s symptoms. It requires lifelong assistance because it affects a person’s thinking, emotions, and interactions with the world.
Michael is charged with second-degree murder but is found not guilty by reason of mental defect. He is eventually committed to the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychotherapy Center in New Hampton, New York in which he remains as of 2023.
(This is a terrible and tragic story. Rosen’s detailed research shows Caroline Costello was a good person, willing to help others, intending to adopt her husband’s faith, and trying to care for Michael in his struggle with an incurable brain dysfunction.)
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 