Akron Public Library

An account of a father's fight to save his child from an extremely severe case of mental illness in the face of overwhelming adversity.

"Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received shocking news that would change his life--his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked...

All Kait Leddy had ever wanted was a little sister. When Kyleigh was born, they were inseparable; Kait would protect her, include her, cuddle and comfort her, and, to Kyleigh, her big sister was her whole world. As they grew, however, and as Kait entered adolescence, her personality began to change. She was lashing out emotionally and physically, and losing touch with reality in certain ways. The family struggled to keep this side of Kait private--at...

"Schizophrenia is a brain disorder that typically occurs in adolescents and young adults between the ages of 18 and 35. Untreated, it can have a wide-ranging and often devastating impact not only on the lives of these young people, but also on those who love and care for them. Indeed, in an era of de-institutionalization and managed care, it is their families who will become the first line of defense against this serious, potentially life-altering...

Bottoms shows, in pitch-perfect prose and with great empathy and dramatic tension, the psychological decline of his brother as he becomes obsessed first with heavy metal music, martial arts, and the occult, and then with the more bizarre aspects of Christianity

"Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis's wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother's suicide Gayle Brandeis's mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant...

"Joan Carol Lieberman's mother developed paranoid schizophrenia shortly after the author's birth in 1942. Her poignant narrative of how she sought optimal distance from her mother's dangerous paranoid impulses is a powerful reminder of the urgent need to find a cure for schizophrenia."

10 books, 1 discussion guide, 6 week checkout. SUMMARY : On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation....