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The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia
Author:
Maclean, David
Biographee:
Maclean, David
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Class:
Biography
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: RC394.A5
Print Run: 30000
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ISBN-13: 9780547519272
LCCN: 2013026337
Imprint: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Pub Date: 01/14/2014
Availability: Out of Stock Indefinitely
List: $25.00
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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292 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
H 9",
W 6",
D 1.18",
1.08 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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Awards:
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Kirkus Best Books
Kirkus Starred Reviews
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Starred Reviews:
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Kirkus Reviews
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TIPS Subjects:
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Psychology/Self-Help
Biography, Individual
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BISAC Subjects: |
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical (incl. Patients)
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
MEDICAL / Diseases
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LC Subjects:
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Amnesiacs, Biography
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
MacLean, David,, 1974-
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SEARS Subjects: |
MacLean, David,, 1974-
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Reading Programs: |
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Annotations |
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 10/01/2013 |
He woke up in a foreign land with no clue how he got there, no memory of his family, no money, and no passport. Then the hallucinations started. MacLean recalls his trip to a mental hospital and his subsequent struggle to find himself after learning that his hallucinations were triggered by a malarial medicine that allowed him to recall TV shows and song lyrics, while memories of his family remained elusive. 304pp., 30K, Auth res: Chicago, B/W Ill. |
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Starred Reviews: |
Kirkus Reviews | 01/01/2014 |
A young writer reckons with his life after amnesia. On Oct. 17, 2002, first-time author MacLean came to while standing in a crush of people on a train platform in India. He had no passport and no clue where he was or what his name was. He then panicked and blacked out again. When he regained consciousness, he was still standing on the platform, utterly confused and terrified, when a kindly police officer found and took him under his protection. Had the author not had his driver's license with him, this memoir may never have been written. The 28-year-old MacLean was in Hyderabad, India, studying on a Fulbright scholarship, a world away from the state of New Mexico that had issued his license. In episodic bursts, the author relates moments he recalls from that day forward. Many of the scenes describing his wild hallucinations and slow return to relative sanity powerfully convey an immediacy, as MacLean and his parents, who rushed from the States to the neuropsychiatric institute where he was taken, learned the cause of his "acute polymorphic psychosis." When MacLean was found, those who first assisted him assumed his amnesia and severe disorientation were the result of recreational drug abuse, but blood work soon revealed the culprit to be an allergic reaction to a prescribed drug with a grave history of inducing psychosis: mefloquine, the popular antimalarial drug better known as Lariam. Much of the memoir's power comes from MacLean's intense descriptions of the altered states he endured as he tried to rediscover his identity. Recalling the return to his parents' home, he writes: "I felt myself slipping, worried that I'd never recover, that I'd be in this wood-glue-filled pinata for the rest of my life. And then if I did recover, if I got everything back, who knew if it would happen again? How many times would I end up touring the exhibits of my curated self?" A mesmerizing debut. MacLean spares no detail in tracing his formidable reconstruction. 304pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2014. |
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Journal Reviews |
Booklist | 12/01/2013 |
While studying in India on a Fulbright scholarship in 2002, Ohio native MacLean abruptly lost consciousness and came to his senses in a Hyderabad train station minus any memories of his name or reasons for being there. Luckily, a kindly station attendant took pity on the presumably drug-addled foreigner and found him refuge in a well-run mental hospital where he hallucinated his way back to reality as friends and parents were contacted. So begins this riveting, sad, and funny memoir from PEN literary award-winner MacLean, expanded from an essay featured on the radio show, This American Life. Contrary to the station agent's assumption, however, MacLean's amnesia was triggered by an allergic reaction to Lariam, a common antimalaria agent that receives a scathing critique here. In addition to short-circuiting his memories, the drug's aftermath forced MacLean to get reacquainted with his parents, a girlfriend, and his rationale for coming to India in the first place. His work is both a sharply written autobiography and an insightful meditation on how much our memories define our identities. Hays, Carl. 304p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2013. |
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Library Journal Prepub Alert | 07/29/2013 |
MacLean was traveling in 2008 when he needed to take a standard malarial medication--and had a shocking but apparently not unprecedented reaction. Coming to in a train station in India ("It was darkness darkness darkness, then snap. Me. Now awake"), he had no memory whatsoever--and his passport was missing. After days spent hallucinating at a mental hospital, he began piecing together his identity--and wasn't entirely pleased with the good-time guy he had been. Now he's a PEN/American award-winning author with this memoir on the way. 304p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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Publishers Weekly | 09/30/2013 |
MacLean fearlessly explores his journey to the edge of madness and his subsequent return to sanity in an unsettling, sometimes riotous, memoir. Destabilized by the brutal side effects of anti-malaria medication in India, MacLean hurtled into near-total amnesia. "I couldn't even think of what name would have been on a passport if I had one or what foreign country I was currently in. This is when I panicked." Committed to a mental hospital, where his allergic drug reaction is diagnosed, MacLean flails unsuccessfully for solid mental touchstones while making vivid, sometimes lovely observations about the swirl of life around him. After a rough return to his Ohio home, he adapts skills "used by any con man" to feign recognition and familiarity with his personal history. He breaks up with his girlfriend, nearly a stranger, and returns to India. The harsh effects of the drug Lariam are described soberly and clinically, but his account of returning to a foreign land proves especially disorienting, though an interlude of romantic misadventure offers some comic relief. He painfully reconstructs his breakdown, which was followed by a return to graduate school and a dreary routine of drinking, punctuated by troubling dreams that left him awake, alone, and bereft. The uneasy peace he attains grows stronger by the end of the book, when it's oddly cheering to read "everyday crazy is something I can handle." Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary. (Jan.). 304p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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9780547519272,dl.it[0].title
Review Citations |
New York Times Book Review | 02/16/2014 |
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