Troy Mira

Carlat confirms the many long standing suspicions both the medical community and the general public hold with regards the mental health “industry” and practitioners. This is not to disparage the field since there is much to salvage from the existing system but it needs serious redress and Carlat touches on many of the key areas for consideration. Recommended read.

*I'm unsure if the numerous typos I encountered in my copy are due to epub formatting or if they exist in the hard copy as well.

Clever premise and a fairly suspenseful multi-layered, multi-lensed plot. Some devices are gimmicky and grow stale quickly. The ‘academic' send up with endless footnotes and references, half of them larks, the other half real but generally pointless, is overdone and tiresome. I enjoy an ergodic read as much as the next guy and don't mind spending hours researching around a book if the end result is a deeper understanding of a coherent whole. In contrast, as a reader I felt the author was contemptuous of my time with all the red herrings even while I understand these are ‘purportedly' put there by a less than reliable narrator, which makes sense in context. I didn't mind having to flip and turn and twist the pages nor the jarring shifts between characters, nested plots, and parallel narration as these work well and are masterfully woven. Readers who like internet mysteries and the like will probably enjoy speculating beyond the read about the countless enigmas within such as the word ‘house', biffed passages, or why the narrator and the deceased man's texts share the same grammatical fingerprint. Others won't make it from cover to cover. Either way, I highly recommend the book but wouldn't suggest you get overly invested in the extraneous.

David writes with casual elegance and, for a work that held the potential for self-indulgence, his compassion and consideration for the many perspectives of those touched by Ted's actions is prevalent throughout. There are aspects, however, that leave me wanting. A more thorough exploration of feelings and conversations around the letters and alienation, for example. The afterword provides a rather eloquent argument for reevaluating mental health stigma.

Abandoned ship a third of the way through.

Tesla, incontestably a visionary and genius, provides here an overly slight survey of his more notable inventions and ideas (no article reprints from Century or Scientific American, no technical drawings, ...) and his own life. Given the grandiosity, periods of high output and countervailing breakdowns in mental and physical capacity, manic-depression seems to have been the fire in his furnace. An admirable, eccentric man. An odd little book.