Friday, January 7, 2011

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So : A Memoir
by Mark Vonnegut

Gee, why does the last name sound so familiar? Of course, Mark is the son of Kurt Vonnegut and we get snippets of what it was like growing up in a family with a famous author. (Before he became a celebrity, he was a car salesman.) We also mainly find out that schizophrenia ran rampant through scores of relatives.
Vonnegut is a pediatrician and in the Introduction, he writes about the fate of medicine and how it has become idiot-proof due to the checklists on templates that doctors fill in so that insurance companies can pay them correctly. That was the most interesting part of the book. Sixty-eight pages later, I stopped reading. He tends to ramble and nothing is cohesive. Each chapter is made up of small vignettes of things that have happened to him or what he is thinking of.
The book is not interesting and kind of ho-hum.
Not recommended.

No comments:

Post a Comment