RaveBookforumFinally lets Schuyler stand out in front once more ... The next fifteen years of biography…require readerly patience of the kind demanded when sorting through who’s who in Tolstoy. They’re also the most unabashedly fun ... Kernan’s hand throughout is quiet, calm ... Kernan’s job is to let us drop in on the poet at work, the resilient friend in need. This is achieved ... The poems are fully formally and musically in control of themselves. So is Kernan as he represents the precariousness of Schuyler’s life and mind ... Kernan neither sensationalizes nor downplays what was true for the poet ... Here, Kernan’s method of citing Schuyler allows the poet to speak for himself—a move that is radical for those with severe mental illness ... Kernan is careful to tell it more like it was.
Gabriel Brownstein
MixedThe New RepublicHere’s the problem: Brownstein wants to make Freud the (very) bad guy of a story that had little to do with him, even if he had a great deal to do with the case becoming a story ... Brownstein thus rewrites up the notorious case, with his chatty, negative asides and interpretations taking center stage ... As author and son, Brownstein is overwhelmed by the research subject he must now try to understand.
Alexander Stille
MixedBookforumMany reporters claim to surface an under-told story, but Stille truly delivers ... Stille offers an exuberant and often moving journalistic account of how this project turned cultic, but he never quite seems to care that the cult started as a utopian Marxist-Freudian project —save that it adds to the wacko factor. Stille’s sometimes pat understandings of Freud and psychoanalysis leave a hole at the center of the story. This is not to say that Stille should have been a better historian, but without taking the particularities of Freud and psychotherapy seriously, the Sullivanians could be seen as a run-of-the-mill cult.
