{"product_id":"best-minds-how-allen-ginsberg-made-revolutionary-poetry-from-madness-9781531502669","title":"Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA revelatory look at how poet Allen Ginsberg transformed experiences of mental illness and madness into some of the most powerful and widely read poems of the twentieth century.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAllen Ginsberg's 1956 poem \"Howl\" opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: \"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.\" Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eBest Minds\u003c\/i\u003e, psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother's devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThough madness is often linked with hardship and suffering, Ginsberg's showed how it could also lead to profound and redemptive aesthetic, spiritual, and social changes. Through his revo-lutionary poetry and social advocacy, Ginsberg dedicated himself to leading others toward new ways of being human and easing pain. \u003cbr\u003eThroughout his celebrated career Ginsberg made us feel as though we knew everything there was to know about him. However, much has been left out about his experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother, his visions, and his psychiatric hospitalization. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eBest Minds\u003c\/i\u003e, with a forty-year career studying and addressing trauma, Weine provides a groundbreaking exploration of the poet and his creative process especially in relation to madness. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eBest Minds \u003c\/i\u003eexamines the complex relationships between mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry, and prophecy--using the access Ginsberg generously shared to offer new, lively, and indis-pensable insights into an American icon. Weine also provides new understandings of the paternalism, treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn light of these new discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his achieve-ments, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDr. Stevan M. Weine \u003c\/b\u003eis Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, where he is also Director of Global Medicine and Director of the Center for Global Health. He is the author of two books: \u003ci\u003eWhen History Is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eTestimony and Catastrophe: Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Fordham University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50525882319122,"sku":"9781531502669","price":25.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_a46fb413-a837-47ea-b05b-66c9311222d2.jpg?v=1731246563","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/best-minds-how-allen-ginsberg-made-revolutionary-poetry-from-madness-9781531502669","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}