Ken Preston-Mafham; Rod Preston-Mafham:Encyclopedia of Insects and Spiders : An Essential Guide to Insects and Spiders of North America and the World
- Paperback 2008, ISBN: 9781592234288
Hardcover
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Very Good. 7.99 x 10 x 1.85 inches. Paperback. 2008. 234 pages. <br>Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as an uncomm on storyteller [with a] trademark a… More...
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Very Good. 7.99 x 10 x 1.85 inches. Paperback. 2008. 234 pages. <br>Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as an uncomm on storyteller [with a] trademark ability to probe the layers of the human psyche, Patrick McGrath has written his most addictive and enthralling novel yet. Charlie Weir's family is comprehensiv ely dysfunctional - abandoned by his father, his mother ravaged b y that betrayal, and his brother, Walt, a successful artist, less Charlie's ally than his rival. So it's hardly surprising that he should find a vocation in psychiatry in New York City, counselin g traumatized war veterans returning home from Vietnam. Agnes Mag ill, the sister of one damaged soldier, soon becomes Charlie's wi fe. But the suicide of her brother, Danny, ends the marriage, lea ving Charlie to endure a corrosive loneliness even as Manhattan g rows steadily more dirty and dangerous around him. Then, in the haunting aftermath of Charlie's mother's death, Agnes returns to offer him the solace that he has never been able to provide for h er. Almost simultaneously, he is presented with a quite different anodyne - a volatile woman whose irresistible beauty, tinged tho ugh it is with an air of grievous suffering, jeopardizes everythi ng he has hoped might restore his dwindling faith in his calling, his future and himself. As Charlie's hold on sanity weakens, an d events conspire to send him reeling headlong toward the abyss, the themes of family, passion and madness - by now synonymous wit h Patrick McGrath's writing - rightly assume the inevitability of myth, as Tobias Wolff has written of his work, in fiction of a d epth and power we hardly hope to encounter anymore. A genuine psy chological thriller, Trauma is an experience at once unnerving, u nsettling and utterly riveting. From the Hardcover edition. Edi torial Reviews From Publishers Weekly McGrath (Port Mungo) manip ulates reader expectations expertly in this sharp-edged psycholog ical study of a man deluded by his personal demons. Charlie Weir, a Manhattan psychiatrist, applies the life skills the members of his badly dysfunctional family have helped him hone to counselin g patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. While everyone el se he knows appears in danger of spinning out of orbit, Charlie e xudes the calmness and confidence of a man in control of his circ umstances. But he's unable to connect emotionally with the women in his life, and he repeatedly revisits his memory of the suicide of his ex-wife's brother, who was also one of his patients. With painstaking precision, McGrath drives this story to a climactic, if hastily resolved, moment of self-revelation in which Charlie uncovers a forgotten personal trauma that has perverted his perce ptions and made him the most unreliable of narrators. Notwithstan ding these efforts to give Charlie's tale the jolt of a psycholog ical thriller, this is a haunting story of a man in the grip of a painful and beautifully articulated spiritual malaise. (Apr.) C opyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the hardcover edi tion. Review Trauma is Patrick McGrath at his dark-hearted best. ...[It] reminds you of how satisfying it is to be unable to put a book down - and then, when it's over, to be sorry and relieved t o enter your own comparatively unhaunted life. -O, The Oprah Maga zine Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as eith er a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair...a terrific literary entertainment . -The Washington Post --This text refers to an out of print or u navailable edition of this title. Excerpt. Reprinted by permiss ion. All rights reserved. My mother's first depressive illness oc curred when I was seven years old, and I felt it was my fault. I felt I should have prevented it. This was about a year before my father left us. His name was Fred Weir. In those days he could be generous, amusing, an expansive man-my brother, Walt, plays the role at times-but there were signs, perceptible to me if not to o thers, when an explosion was imminent. Then the sudden loss of te mper, the storming from the room, the slamming door at the end of the hall and the appalled silence afterward. But I could deflect all this. I would play the fool, or be the baby, distract him fr om the mounting wave of boredom and frustration he must have felt at being trapped within the suffocating domestic atmosphere my m other liked to foster. Later, when she began writing books, she f ostered no atmosphere at all other than genteel squalor and heavy drinking and gloom. But by then my father was long gone. In tho se days we lived in shabby discomfort in a large apartment on Wes t Eighty-seventh Street, where my brother lives with his family t oday. I never contested Walt's right to have it after Mom died, a nd have come to terms with the fact that to me she left nothing. Indeed, it amuses me that she would throw this one last insult in my face from beyond the grave. It was more appropriate that Walt should have the apartment, given the size of his family, and me living alone, although Walt didn't actually need the apartment. W alt was a wealthy man-Walter Weir, the painter? But I don't resen t this, although having said that, or rather, had I heard one of my patients say it, I would at once detect the anger behind the w ords. With consummate skill I would then extricate the truth, bri ng it up to the surface where we both could face it square: You h ated your mother! You hate her still! I am, as will be apparent by now, a psychiatrist. I do professionally that which you do nat urally for those you care for, those whose welfare has been entru sted to you. My office was for many years on Park Avenue, which i s less impressive than it sounds. The rent was low, and so were m y fees. I worked mostly with victims of trauma, who of all the me ntally disturbed people in the city of New York feel it most acut ely, that they are owed for what they've suffered. It makes them slow to pay their bills. I chose this line of work because of my mother, and I am not alone in this. It is the mothers who propel most of us into psychiatry, usually because we have failed them. Often a patient will be referred to me, and after the preliminar ies have been completed and he, or more usually she, is settled c omfortably, this will be her question: Where would you like me to begin? Just tell me what you've been thinking about. Nothing. What were you thinking about on your way to this appointment? A nd so it begins. I listen. Mine is a profession that might on the surface appear to suit the passive personality. But don't be too quick to assume that we are uninterested in power. I sit there p ondering while you tell me your thoughts, and with my grunts and sighs, my occasional interruptions, I guide you toward what I bel ieve to be the true core and substance of your problem. It is not a scientific endeavor. No, I feel my way into your experience wi th an intuition based on little more than a few years of practice , and reading, and focused introspection; in other words, there i s much of art in what I do. My mother did eventually recover, bu t there is a strong correlation between depression and anger and at some level she stayed angry. It was largely directed at my fat her, of course. I have a clear memory of the day I first became a ware of my parents' dynamic of abandonment and rage. Fred had tak en Walter and me to lunch, a thing he did occasionally when he wa s in town and remembered that he had two sons living on West Eigh ty-seventh Street. For me these were stressful events, starting w ith the cab ride to an East Side steakhouse, though in fact any t ime spent with my father was stressful. One summer he took us on a road trip upstate to a hotel in the Catskills, a journey of pur e unmitigated hell, the endless hours sitting beside Walter in th e back of the Buick as we drove through the endless mountains, an d the atmosphere never less than explosive- Fred Weir was still handsome then, his dark hair swept back from a sharp peak in a hi gh-templed forehead, a tall, athletic fellow with a charming grin . He wasn't a successful man but he gave the impression of being one, and when he took us out to lunch I marveled at the peremptor y tone with which he addressed the waiters, brisk unsmiling men i n starched white aprons who, in that adult room of wood paneling and cigar smoke, thoroughly intimidated the lanky, nervous adoles cent I then was. My anxiety was not eased by the presence of stea k knives with heavy wooden handles and sharp serrated blades, and a sort of diabolical trolley that was wheeled, steaming, to the table by a stout man with a pencil mustache who with the flourish of a gleaming knife indicated the meat and demanded to know wher e I wanted it carved. When Fred grew bored with us and showed si gns of calling for the check, Walt would ask him for investment a dvice, claiming to have considerable funds stashed away. Walt was always more curious about our father than I was. As a boy he was intrigued as to what went on in our parents' bedroom, when they shared a bedroom, that is. He wanted to get in there and find out what they did. Mom was distressed when we returned from these o utings, having in our absence awoken to the possibility that Fred might exert a stronger influence over her boys than she did and that we too would then be lost to her. It fell to me to assure he r of our love and loyalty. Then she lavished her affection on me for a while, until she grew distracted and drifted off down the h all to her study. Hearing the door close and the tap-tap-tap of t he typewriter, I knew she would not come out before it was time f or a cocktail. I was comforted by the sound of the typewriter. If she was typing then she wasn't crying, although later she was ab le to do both at once. But I remember one day when we returned t o the apartment and she wasn't waiting in the hallway as we came up the stairs. This was unusual. We let ourselves in and at once heard her crying in her bedroom. It was pitiful. Walter said he w as going out again, I could do what I wanted. I see myself with g reat clarity at that moment. The choice was simple. I could walk out of the apartment with him and spend an hour or two in Central Park, or I could go and knock on my mother's bedroom door and as k her what was wrong. I remember sitting down on the chair in the hallway, beside the low desk with the telephone on it, where she always left her keys on the tray and fixed her hair in the mirro r on the wall above it. I'm not waiting, Walt said from the fron t door. A sudden fresh gust of misery from the bedroom. I think I'll stay. Suit yourself, he said, and the front door closed be hind him. For another minute I sat on the chair in the hallway, then stood up and walked slowly toward her room. This is how psyc hiatrists are made. Much of my later childhood and adolescence f ollowed this pattern. I did not make friends easily, and I was mo re content by far with a book than with the company of my contemp oraries. Walter by contrast was a gregarious boy and often brough t his friends back to the apartment. This was a source of pleasur e to my mother, although if she was depressed she would withdraw to her bedroom. At times like this it was a cause of concern to m e that Walter's friends made so much noise. I remember I stood in the doorway of the living room once and asked them to be quiet, as Mom was resting. They were dancing to Bill Haley. Walter would have been about seventeen; I was three years younger. I remember he turned the record player off and they all stared at me, six o r seven of them, older kids I'd seen in the corridors of the high school we attended on the Upper West Side. What did you say? sa id Walter. If it hadn't been for the fact that Mom was trying to sleep I would have fled. I said, I think you should turn it dow n. They all stared at me in silence. It was a form of mockery. W hat did you say? said Walter again. Turn it down! She's trying t o get some sleep! He looked at the others and solemnly repeated my words. They started laughing. They slapped their thighs, they yelped like hyenas; they lifted their heads and howled, all to hu miliate me. Then Mom's bedroom door opened down the hall. She shu ffled toward the living room, yawning. She was in her robe, baref oot, and she hadn't brushed her hair. It was the middle of the af ternoon and I felt embarrassed for her in front of Walter's frien ds, who had fallen silent. She stood in the doorway and asked wha t was going on, and Walter told her. She was still half asleep. S he turned to me. Don't be silly, Charlie, I was only reading. Yo u people have fun, I don't care. She went back to her room with a wave of her hand and I left the apartment feeling angry and ash amed. When I returned to New York after my residency at Johns Ho pkins, I didn't move back to Eighty-seventh Street. Mom told me s he didn't want me in the apartment. She said she needed silence i n order to write. I understood what she was telling me. It was no t a rejection, though it was framed in those terms, because she a lso gave me a new set of keys. Don't abandon me, she was saying. She was stabilized on antidepressants but there were still times when she would suddenly, precipitately go down, and then it was m e she needed. From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Patrick McGrath is the author of six previous novels, incl uding Asylum and Spider, and two collections of stories. He lives in New York. From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. ., Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2008, 3, Readerlink Distribution Services, LLC, 2005. Hardcover. Good. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.Dust jacket quality is not guaranteed., Readerlink Distribution Services, LLC, 2005, 2.5<
