Click Here for Reviews of The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, by Darian Leader and Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression, by Sally Brampton. Reviewed by Hillary Mantel in The Guardian.
Comments on the Reviews by Paul Brinich:
Writing about mourning, melancholia, and depression, Darian Leader writes that
“quick-fix remedies work in the same way as a missile strike works on aterrorist base. In the short term it looks successful, but it does nothing to alter the terrorist mindset. When loss and misery enter our lives, we are impatient to condense a process that, by nature or through talking therapies, can only be worked out over years. We want a name for our condition, and we want a timetable. Even mourning has become target-driven; we are supposed to move through loss in key stages, like schoolchildren, and to lag behind is to demonstrate a pathology.”
The Guardian’s reviewer, Hilary Mantel, gives good marks to Leader’s “The new black: Mourning, melancholia, and depression” while panning Sally Brampton’s “Shoot the damn dog: A memoir of depression.”