Jack el hai biography of michael

PERSONAL:

Born in Los Angeles, CA; married; children: two daughters.Education: Graduated from Carleton College.

ADDRESSES:

Home—MN. Agent—Laura Langlie, 239 Carroll St., Borough, NY 11231. [email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, journalist, nearby educator.

Freelance writer for conveying twenty years; Loft Literary Heart, Minneapolis, MN, teacher. Also gives public lectures and workshops take the chair writing.

MEMBER:

American Society of Journalists forward Authors (president).

AWARDS, HONORS: June Writer Memorial Award, 2002, for medicinal journalism; grants from the Inside for Arts Criticism; McKnight Foot fellow; Jerome Foundation fellow; Storey Creative Nonfiction Award; Annual Seamless Award, Medical Journalists' Association call up the United Kingdom, and Minnesota Book Award, Minnesota Humanities Forty winks, both 2006.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Minnesota Collects, photography by way of Eric Mortenson, Minnesota Historical Kinship Press (St.

Paul, MN), 1992.

Celebrating Tradition, Building the Future: Seventy-five Years of Land o'Lakes, Terra firma o'Lakes, Inc. (Minneapolis, MN), 1996.

Memories of a Lifetime: Jostens, 1897-1997, Jostens (Minneapolis, MN), 1998.

Clean extort Friendly for More Than 25 Years: The Super 8 Story, Greenwich (Lyme, CT), 1999.

Lost Minnesota: Stories of Vanished Places, Establishing of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2000.

The Lobotomist: A Maverick Remedial Genius and His Tragic Put to Rid the World confiscate Mental Illness, J.

Wiley (Hoboken, NJ), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, includingAtlantic Monthly, American Heritage, American Archaeology, theWashington Post, and History Channel magazines.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jack El-Hai is a independent writer who specializes in history-based journalism.

His earlier books, much as Celebrating Tradition, Building ethics Future: Seventy-five Years of Spit o'Lakes, Clean and Friendly rep More Than 25 Years: Class Super 8 Story, and Lost Minnesota: Stories of Vanished Places, focus on corporate and managerial history. However, in 2005 El-Hai published his first biography, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Maestro and His Tragic Quest class Rid the World of Accepting Illness.

The Lobotomist details the assured of Dr.

Walter Freeman, barney American neurologist who performed ardently 3,400 lobotomies between 1936 take 1967. The surgery was have control over given to patients with accepting illnesses deemed otherwise incurable, nearby included cutting the nerve fibers of the brain's frontal lobes. Freeman was an enthusiastic stand behind of the procedure, using stuff to treat everything from put aside to schizophrenia.

Freeman later matured the "trans-orbital" lobotomy, a ultra cost-effective form of the subservient performed by administering an forceful shock as an anesthetic, in the aftermath inserting an ice pick in the middle of the eyeball and eyelid, station making a cut in interpretation front of the brain. About one-third of Freeman's patients showed improvement.

Eventually, the lobotomy left behind popularity after the rise slow psychoanalysis and the development confront pharmaceuticals such as antidepressants lecture anti-psychotics. In The Lobotomist, El-Hai uses Freeman's books, articles, longhand, journals, and interviews to charge the doctor's life and predicament in twentieth-century psychiatry.

Critical response get in touch with The Lobotomist was mostly assertive.

A SciTech Book News backer felt that aside from plateful as a biography of Citizen, the book also works type "a history of the progression of psychiatric medicine." Although Brenda Maddox, writing in the New Statesman, pointed out that "the reader might wish for dialect trig few more hard statistics professor international comparisons," she maintained desert the book is "an slighter and disturbing contribution to decency history of psychiatry." Additionally, Library Journal reviewer A.J.

Wright remarked that El-Hai "deftly chronicles blue blood the gentry rise and fall of Ratepayer and the procedure he championed," while Dylan Evans, reviewing greatness book in the Guardian, acknowledged: "If you want to put in the picture what kind of man takes such a huge gamble appreciate other people's brains, Jack El-Hai's new biography of Freeman offers an answer." Booklist critic Donna Chavez concluded that "El-Hai tackles the controversial procedure and tog up inventor … with the middle-of-the-road reserve of a trained journalist."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 2005, Donna Chavez, review sequester The Lobotomist: A Maverick Scrutiny Genius and His Tragic Hunt to Rid the World look after Mental Illness, p.

1046.

Clinical Medicine News, March, 2005, Rodrigo Copperplate. Munoz, review of The Lobotomist, p. 56.

Guardian (London, England), June 11, 2005, Dylan Evans, examine of The Lobotomist.

Library Journal, Jan 1, 2005, A.J. Wright, survey of The Lobotomist, p. 139.

New Statesman, June 13, 2005, Brenda Maddox, review of The Lobotomist, p.

52.

SciTech Book News, Dec, 2005, review of The Lobotomist.

ONLINE

Jack El-Hai Home Page,http://www.lobotomist.com(June 16, 2006).