Awards

• Commended for Connecticut Book Awards (Biography/Memoir) 2006

Overview

Day after day, night after night, the desperate men come and sit in the black chair next to Charles Barbers desk in a basement office at Bellevue and tell of their travails, of prison and AIDS and heroin, of crack and methadone and sexual abuse, and the voices that plague them. In the silence between the stories, amid the peeling paint, musty odour, and flickering fluorescent light, Barber observes that this isnt really where he is supposed to be. How this child of privilege, the product of Andover and Harvard and Columbia, came to find himself at home among the homeless of New York City is just one story Barber tells in Songs from the Black Chair. Interlaced with his memoir, and illuminating the nightmare of mental illness that gripped him after his friends suicide, are the stories of his confidants at Bellevue and the mental health shelters of Manhattan--men so traumatized by the distortions of their lives and minds that only in the chaotic aftermath of 9/11 do they feel in sync with their world. In the intertwined narrative of these troubled lives and his own, Charles Barber brings to shimmering light some of the most disturbing and enduring truths of human nature. Charles Barber is an associate of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, Yale University School of Medicine.

Full Product Details

9780803212985

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Reviews

An amazing book... Barber is a gifted writer, and the work he has produced is an important addition to the literature of both mental health and New York City. The Village Voice A beautifully written, and very moving memoir--a story of hope and talent that persists, no matter the tragedies that await any of us at one or another point in our lives. --Robert Coles, James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and author of The Spiritual Lives of Children A complex and sophisticated memoir by a young man who survived a harrowing brush with mental illness and eventually became, by a roundabout route, a mental health professional. His account of his odyssey is compelling, disturbing, many-faceted, and highly imaginative. I've never read another book quite like it. --William Finnegan, author of Cold New World: Growing up in Harder Country and staff writer for The New Yorker Written from inside the belly of the beast, Charles Barber's Songs soars like a lovely melody above the din of the world, and in juxtaposition to the silence of those who suffer from mental illness of any sort. Engrossing, perceptive, and elegantly written. --Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana and winner of the National Book Award A beautifully rendered look at other people's, and the author's, struggles with mental illness. The Bloomsbury Review

"""An amazing book... Barber is a gifted writer, and the work he has produced is an important addition to the literature of both mental health and New York City."" The Village Voice ""A beautifully written, and very moving memoir--a story of hope and talent that persists, no matter the tragedies that await any of us at one or another point in our lives.""--Robert Coles, James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and author of The Spiritual Lives of Children ""A complex and sophisticated memoir by a young man who survived a harrowing brush with mental illness and eventually became, by a roundabout route, a mental health professional. His account of his odyssey is compelling, disturbing, many-faceted, and highly imaginative. I've never read another book quite like it.""--William Finnegan, author of Cold New World: Growing up in Harder Country and staff writer for The New Yorker ""Written from inside the belly of the beast, Charles Barber's Songs soars like a lovely melody above the din of the world, and in juxtaposition to the silence of those who suffer from mental illness of any sort. Engrossing, perceptive, and elegantly written.""--Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana and winner of the National Book Award ""A beautifully rendered look at other people's, and the author's, struggles with mental illness."" The Bloomsbury Review"

First-book author Barber recalls the suicide of one boyhood friend, the disintegration of another, his own experiences working with the homeless, mentally handicapped and mentally ill-and wonders why he's been able to emerge from the tangled wood and others have not. Barber (Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health/Yale Univ. School of Medicine) mixes affecting autobiographical anecdotes, self-deprecating humor, summaries of psychiatric cases and speculations about the meaning of life. He begins with his most powerful segment, the 1983 suicide of his close friend Henry, an act no one witnessed but that Barber imagines with great poignancy. (Later, he employs, to diminishing effect, the same technique in imagining the suicide of that same friend's mother, who years later killed herself in the same remote location and fashion as her son.) Barber relates many stories about his school and collegiate days (he dropped out of Harvard, then returned and graduated), including some harrowing times when he watched Henry systematically destroy every object in his room. He also tells about his long struggles with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) and his initially liberating experiences with Prozac, along the way offering some details about his parents and about his courtship and marriage. He sort of backed into the mental health profession by taking a job in a home for the mentally retarded, which led to his eventually working long hours at Bellevue and helping at homeless shelters. His wife's pregnancy, he says, transported him from the shelters to the Ivy League. In closing, Barber observes that he and his close friends-all bright, all successful in school-might have struggled because they'd had to create their own war to fight, unlike the WWII and Vietnam generations, who were challenged by history more directly and profoundly. Some of the segments-especially the long case narratives-seem more tangential than essential. Moments of undeniable power punctuate a sometimes disordered narrative. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Charles Barber is an associate of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, Yale University School of Medicine.

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