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| Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family's Schizophrenia | 
 enlarge | Author: Patrick Tracey
Publisher: Bantam
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00 (€18.96)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (30 reviews)
Sales Rank: 84659
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.2
ISBN: 0553805258
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.8980092
EAN: 9780553805253
ASIN: 0553805258
Publication Date: August 26, 2008
Release Date: August 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In this powerful, sometimes harrowing, deeply felt story, Patrick Tracey journeys to Ireland to track the origin and solve the mystery of his Irish-American family's multigenerational struggle with schizophrenia.
For most Irish Americans, a trip to Ireland is often an occasion to revisit their family's roots. But for Patrick Tracey, the lure of his ancestral home is a much more powerful need: part pilgrimage, part investigation to confront the genealogical mystery of schizophrenia?a disease that had claimed a great-great-great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and, most recently, two sisters.
As long as Tracey could remember, schizophrenia ran on his mother's side, seldom spoken of outright but impossible to ignore. Devastated by the emotional toll the disease had already taken on his family, terrified of passing it on to any children he might have, and inspired by the recent discovery of the first genetic link to schizophrenia, Tracey followed his genealogical trail from Boston to Ireland's county Roscommon, home of his oldest-known schizophrenic ancestor. In a renovated camper, Tracey crossed the Emerald Isle to investigate the country that, until the 1960s, had the world's highest rate of institutionalization for mental illness, following clues and separating fact from fiction in the legendary relationship the Irish have had with madness.
Tracey's path leads from fairy mounds and ancient caverns still shrouded in superstition to old pubs whose colorful inhabitants are a treasure trove of local lore. He visits the massive and grim asylum where his famine starved ancestors may have lived. And he interviews the Irish research team that first cracked the schizophrenic code to learn how much?and how little?we know about this often misunderstood disease.
Filled with history, science, and lore, Stalking Irish Madness is an unforgettable chronicle of one man's attempt to make sense of his family's past and to find hope for the future of schizophrenic patients.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 25 more reviews...
The Prodigal Son Comes Home December 14, 2008
When I read Patrick Tracey's compelling memoir, "Stalking Irish Madness", I was reminded of a wonderful passage written by Rachel Carson in her book "The Sea Around Us": "For all at last returns to the sea--to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end."
The ocean of this book is as much metaphorical as it is actual. Just as his ancestors did generations before, Patrick crossed an ocean, perhaps first to escape the Irish madness afflicting his family. Then again, to come to terms with it: the schizophrenia that overcame his two sisters, and his own substance abuse. The journey he recounts about his childhood, his family, and his genealogical roots seemed to this reader to be a journey for redemption. This odyssey, which began in Boston, ends there, with the prodigal son returning to embrace his family, becoming both caretaker and witness to the continuing saga.
The author's story recounts his travels to trace his family's genealogy and his efforts to understand the current scientific thinking about the origins of schizophrenia. But the author's true gift is evident in the telling of the personal insights from his Irish odyssey. He has an engaging prose style and a journalist's perceptive stance, but retains the sense of this being a deeply personal experience.
At memoir's end, when Patrick returns home to Boston to reconnect with his four sisters, I felt as though he was ready for the redemption he sought when his journey began.
STALKING MY IRISH FRIEND December 11, 2008
Here's a testament to how much I loved and admired this wonderful book ... after I read it I stuffed it into my briefcase so I'd always have it with me when I saw my Irish friend. When I finally saw him I told him I had something very special for him and you can imagine what he said ... even in front of other people. I guess I shouldn't have winked at him.
Anyhow, Patrick Tracey has written a unique travelogue of Ireland as well as an account of a bittersweet journey of familial understanding, love, and mercy. This well-written book will mist your eyes, and after you're finished, you're convinced that Tracey is the kind of son or brother you'd want in your family. He cares deeply about his family ... and he helps you love them, too.
Reviewer Todd Sentell, a Psychology major who graduated "Oh Lordy," is also the author of the hilarious social satire, TOONAMINT OF CHAMPIONS
Way better than not terrible December 8, 2008
Since I've known Patrick Tracey from way back in the debauching days I had heard many of these family stories but never imagined he would eventually craft them into such a compelling book. When a friend publishes a book it is always a relief to find out it just doesn't suck. In this case I can honestly say I don't have to scrape up a single polite platitude. It is just plain well-done.
Old Ireland, Family & Madness is pretty much the trifecta of a potential slough of maudlin dreck, but Tracey manages to tread perfectly through the bog, capturing the genuine pathos of family tradgedy and the facinating science (more precisely, the maddeningly elusive lack of science)that is schizophrenia.
Stalking Irish Madness: 'a beautiful gift' November 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I didn't so much read as devour Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for The Roots of my Family's Schizophrenia, in which writer Patrick Tracey travels to Ireland to unravel the origins of his Irish-American family's multi-generational struggle with schizophrenia. Two of Tracey's sisters, his uncle, his grandmother, and a grandmother several generations back have been victims of the brain disorder.
Tracey had the discipline to hold back the drama and fireworks that many writers would have been tempted to include in a book about schizophrenia. His love for his sisters is so palpable and sweet that it makes what happens to them stand out starkly and heartbreakingly in a way that histrionics could not.
The structure--part memoir, part history, part Travels with Charley, part detective nonfiction--and Tracey's insight, honesty, and sense of humor make the book a page-turner. He writes easily about the dry stuff, which all too often writers can make stultifying: history, medicine, mythology. Tracey's journey through Ireland past and present is a worthy read unto itself.
Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for The Roots of my Family's Schizophrenia will share space on my bookshelf with others that have changed my way of looking at the human brain and helped me understand a little about what it's like to live with mental illness or mental differences: An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jameson, about bipolar disorder; and Temple Grandin's Thinking in Pictures, about autism, among them.
The book is a beautiful gift to Tracey's sisters; to families whose pasts, presents, and futures have been and will be marked by schizophrenia; to all of us who have struggled or have loved anyone who has; and to all who are seeking understanding about ourselves and about love.
 Compelling story, but deficient genealogy November 27, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
American journalist Patrick Tracey sets out to trace the origins of his family's multigenerational struggle with schizophrenia. The disease runs on his mother's Irish side, claiming a third great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and two of his four sisters. Stalking Irish Madness interweaves his personal quest with history, science, and lore, as he hunts for answers in Ireland.
Tracey has a fascinating story to tell and does so with engaging prose. He sheds light on this debilitating familial disease. For those aspects, he earns a five-star rating. The publisher is to be commended for including an index, something that is often not a consideration in a commercially published family history memoir. A drop-line chart, showing the descent from the author's third great-grandmother, Mary Egan, to the author would have been a welcomed visual addition.
But where the book falls short, surprisingly, is in the genealogical research, which is why this book receives only a three-star rating. Other than to cite family lore, Tracey never provides the generational links or names from his grandmother to his third great-grandmother. "From what little my grandfather said, and the small bits my mother added, it all started with the Egans.... I have a name Mary Egan" (p. 70). From this same family lore he has a place, Kiltoom Parish in Co. Roscommon, and for Tracey that's apparently enough for him to begin his eighteen-week search in Ireland. There's no indication that the author did research in American sources to confirm the generations between his grandmother and third great-grandmother to ensure the information handed down was accurate and sufficient to make the trip worthwhile.
On page 236, the author references a passenger list of the ship Anglo-Saxon, showing a John Egan and "Mrs. Egan" arriving in Boston in 1847. Since he does not detail what, if any, additional searches he did in American records, it leaves the genealogical reader wondering how he concluded that this John and "Mrs. Egan" are his ancestors. Other than ages, there's no further identifying information, and curiously, the "country to which they severally belong" is England, not Ireland, as other passengers on that list were recorded.
Tracey spends much of his time searching Egans in Ireland, rather than his third great-grandmother's birth family for genetic links to schizophrenia. His research in Irish parish records evidently dead ends when he can't find any children born and baptized to a Mary and John Egan before they emigrated, so he's unable to determine her maiden name.
The author claims he is "not enamored of genealogy" (p. 126), which is understandable when a person not well versed in genealogical methods and sources quickly feels the agony of defeat from not knowing how to conduct sound research. When he finds a Mary Gallagher Egan in the parish baptism records (he gives no husband's name), and she is the mother of Brigid, baptized in 1835, he states, "Since my Mary would've been twelve or thirteen [based on the age of "Mrs. Egan" in the passenger list], it's more likely Brigid was a sister, or a cousin." He offers no foundation for this speculation, and apparently does not comprehend that Brigid is an Egan. Unless Mary's maiden name is also Egan, these two aren't likely to be sisters. Then the author adds, "There was no Brigid listed on the passenger records of the ship that carried John and Mary to America. Whoever she was, I suspect she may have perished in the journey out of Ireland" (p. 125-26). Again, there's no foundation for the speculation. Genealogists, of course, realize that if a Brigid did board the same ship with John and "Mrs. Egan," she would have been recorded on the passenger manifest, and if she did perish on the journey, more than likely, her death would have been noted on the list, too.
Granted, most readers probably aren't as interested in the details of Tracey's search as genealogists would be. But the lack of genealogical facts makes us wonder whether he's even tracing the right ancestors, in either Ireland or America. For a book that focuses on family history and genetic links, it's astonishing and disappointing that the author, a journalist, apparently did not attempt even the basics of U.S. genealogical research. He falls into the typical novice trap of eagerly hurdling the ocean without methodically documenting each generation and securing enough identifying information to link immigrant ancestors to their place of origin.
There's no denying that the most compelling aspect of the book is the stories of his afflicted two sisters. Just watching them become stricken with schizophrenia on these pages is heart wrenching enough; one can only imagine the anguish the author and his family must have felt to witness it in person. It's not at all surprising that Tracey felt a need to search for the roots of the family's madness. It's unfortunate that he didn't consult a skilled genealogist who would have established his correct lineage and might have been able to help him achieve greater success.
--Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, Certified Genealogist
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