my goodreads review of susanne paola antonetta's new book

I always forget to update my  Goodreads to reflect what I've read, but I just managed to add a few short story collections, and today I wrote something about THE DEVIL'S CASTLE. Another book I wish I'd read before I completed THE LUNATICS' BALL, though I don't know whether it would have changed my book. I was particularly interested in the blend of memoir and researched history, also her discussion of the DSM and eugenics and medication. My review: 

"I taught creative nonfiction workshops for many years with Susanne Paola and Brenda Miller’s Tell It Slant, and I particularly enjoyed the hybrid approach to creative nonfiction in The Devil’s Castle. While the first part of the subtitle (Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today) suggests that the book will primarily be a researched history, I already knew to expect more: not only a history of the Nazi extermination of neurodivergent people (in Sonnenburg, the infamous Devil’s Castle) and a history of the eugenic thinking in the U.S. and Germany that persists in psychiatry today, but braided accounts of two fascinating historical figures, Paul Schreber and Dorothea Buck, animated and punctuated by the author’s own psychiatric experiences. The memoir element in this text increases the urgency and timeliness of the historical stories she tells, which extend to the present day in the U.S., “the point where medicine meets money.” A compelling history/memoir, a hybrid genre that has become increasingly important, The Devil’s Castle is deeply researched and deeply felt. "