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NIGHT FALLS FAST: UNDERSTANDING SUICIDE. Kay Redfield Jamison. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000, 432 pp., $26.00.
As book review editor for the CSWJ I receive many books from publishers and then typically sort them, choosing some for full review, locating a clinical social worker with expertise and interest in the subject area to write the review. However, I happened across Redfield's Night Falls Fast while perusing the new bookshelf at our city library. I checked it out, but kept it for many weeks before opening it, alternately feeling drawn to it and repelled by it. I had read one of Redfield's previous books, An Unquiet Mind, an account of manic-depressive illness and had made it required reading for one of my graduate courses. I knew that Redfield writes with a rare combination of scholarship and exquisite sensitivity of "nearness," and I had no doubt that this style would characterize Night Falls Fast as well. Interestingly, it didn't occur to me to send it out to review. I was saving it.
Fortunately, I picked up the book. After reading the prologue, five pages, I knew at once that I would not stop reading until I was finished. I also knew that as soon as I finished reading that I would move immediately to the computer to write a review. Postmodernism "demands" attention to context. Part of the context here is my own experience of losing a former patient to suicide several years ago. Since that time I have talked, analyzed, researched, written, and taught about various aspects of suicide. The loss of that patient was for me as it is for many therapists a nodal professional and personal event. Jamison's book is a...