Sign-In
Cart
In All Things: A Return to the Drooling Ward
Paperback
ISBN13: 9780986069727
Publisher: Wedgewood Press
Published: Aug 1 2014
Pages: 86
Weight: 0.22
Height: 0.18 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
. . . powerful; beautifully written, well-observed and effective.
--Kirkus Review
In 1970, a seventeen-year-old trainee enters the psychiatric technician training program at Sonoma State Hospital. Having volunteered there as a high school student, he feels fairly well prepared and presumes that conditions like those in Jack London's 1914 short story about the place, Told in the Drooling Ward are a thing of the past. He soon discovers that what really happens behind the closed doors of the institution has not changed much since London's time, certainly not for the better.
Taught the necessary skill of how to choke out a patient on his first day, and told with a shrug that sometimes when patients run away to the nearby hills, they're never found, the young trainee is thrust into a world of austere realities that most adults would balk at entering.
Based on author Ed Davis's real-life experiences, In All Things is an honest reflection of a pivotal time in his life, as well as a compelling social commentary on how mental institutions were run in the 1970s. Told as a fictionalized, first-person narrative and expressed with stirring compassion, his story is an open door into a dark part of our history that will stay with you long after you read the last page.
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback