not a review with lots of clips

A couple weeks ago, in constant search of reading material, I happened upon Lost in America, one of the most interesting and stirring books I’ve read in a while. It’s a personal account of Sherwin Nuland, successful Yale surgeon, and author of New York Times bestseller, How We Die. While the focus of the book is on the author’s conflicted relationship with his father and how it affected it and continues to affect him, as he writes in the introduction:

My father’s power and the weakness that nurtured it have accompanies me all the days of my life. I have struggled to be the un-him—to be the opposite of what he was—and in the struggling I have faltered and fallen many times. His lingering power over me has been the source of much of my weakness; I have responded to the threat of his wakens by seeking to find ways to resist it—to be so powerful against it that I am unassailable by the great portion of himself that he has left within me. And in the process, I have instead become rather more like him than less.

I am writing this book to help me come to terms with my father. I am writing this book to finally make peace with him, and perhaps with myself.

Nuland along the way manages to also present us with a seemingly comprehensive account of his coming of age and beyond. I found it fascinating to read such a frank account by a somewhat public figure that is not quite on the brink of death. That is, Nuland writes very openly about many things that most people would find too personal to reveal to the world. For instance he provides a vivid account of his battles with debilitating depression:

From my late thirties until my early forties, I underwent a period of depression that gradually deepened into an intensity so absolute that I finally required admission to a mental hospital, where I stayed for more than a year. Neither medication, psychotherapy, the determined efforts of friends not the devotion of the few people whose love never deserted me had even the most minimal beneficial effect on my worsening state of mind. Finally, faced with my resistance to all forms of treatment till then attempted, the senior psychiatrists at the institution in which I was confined recommended the draconian measure of lobotomy. Their justification for such a drastic course was that disrupting the brain’s neural pathways might bring an immediate end to the complex of obsessional thinking and behavior to which I had succumbed.

I was, in fact, completely disabled by pathological preoccupations and fears. Obsession with coincidences; fixations on recurrent numbers; feelings of worthlessness and physical or sexual inadequacy; religious anxieties of guilt and concerns about G-d’s will; ritualistic thinking and behavior—they crowded in on one another so forcefully as to occupy every lacuna of my mind. I covered before them, not only emotionally but physically, too—my hunched-over posture reflected my decline into helplessness. Rational thinking was driven out by a ferocity of fear that consumed all energy and pride. I came not to have a moment’s peace form the din and deluge of that rampaging stampede of obsessional ideations. So profound was my depression and so tyrannical the jumble of unbidden thoughts and compulsive actions that they ruled the hours of my days and the day of my years. I feared the obsessions, I feared the threatening loss of control, and I feared the fear—all at once. Mostly, I feared for my sanity. (Read more here.)

Another thing I found interesting was his general (conflicting?) attitude towards Judaism (and how it evolved):

Formalized religion, formalized prayer, formalized observance—they are all part of the heritage of my family, and I cherish the sustenance they give me. More than cherish—I need it. As agnostic as my philosophy is, the synagogue has been a place of refuge and a home for me, and the congregation a family. With my wife and my children, I go there more occasionally, a skeptic faithful to his memories.