May 9, 2010

Carlton Davis' memoir Bipolar Bare-my life journey with mental disorder has received its third award. Previously a finalist in the Independent Excellence Book Awards, and a finalist for the Montaigne Medal for ground breaking work from the Eric Hoffer Awards, the book is selected as a Runner –Up Winner in the category of memoirs from the Eric Hoffer Awards for 2010

The Eric Hoffer awards are given yearly in honor of the great American philosopher to highlight salient writing as well as the independent spirit of small publishers, micro publishers, academic presses, and self-published books. Bipolar Bare is a self-published work by Create Space and was first published in March of 2009.

Here is what the comments are about this work.

Bipolar Bare, Carlton Davis, Create Space - This is a fascinating, complex memoir, quite possibly ground-breaking. Writer Carlton Davis is also an architect and an artist who has long lived with mental illness. His memoir chronicles the onset of his problems, his treatments, his relapses, his final diagnosis and his journey to better health. Today, at over 60, he is not institutionalized, no longer suicidal, no longer abusing substances. His artwork (good, but sometimes terrifying) is featured throughout the book. Davis had an unhappy childhood: his mom abandoned him before he was six, never to be seen again until he found her decades later. As a young boy, Davis wished to be a girl. He graduated from Yale as an architect, worked in his field, married, had a daughter, divorced and remarried. The value of this memoir, grueling in parts to read, is that the man is clearly not crazy and, by its end, he is functioning the way most of us function—on a sane, managing level, most of the time. One assumes writing the book helped. Bipolar bare should provide hope for those with a mental illness and their family members and friends.