He Wanted the Moon by Mimi Baird

He Wanted the Moon is an extremely disturbing and uncomfortable book to read; not only because it bares open some of the craziest extremes of the cruelty that humans can possess, but also because everything that's been written are true events. It's not just a modern day horror story that a brilliant story-teller conjured up out of nowhere except from her vivid imagination; everything written in here, every little gory detail, had been real, the people in it had been real. And perhaps knowing that made it so difficult to get through this book, but it was also that, that kept me reading. I couldn't put this book down; the idea of it almost felt like a disservice to the voice speaking to me, to the readers. I finished reading it in one night and its impact on me was hard. I even had trouble falling asleep afterwards. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like for Mimi Baird to actually write this book about her father.

He Wanted the Moon is partly an autobiography of a brilliant doctor and scientist, Dr. Perry Baird, who wrote the manuscript of his book while suffering from manic depression, also known as bipolar disorder. The last half of the book is written by Mimi Baird, Dr. Baird's daughter, after she had found this manuscript, decades after the death of her estranged father. She had no clue what he went through all those years ago when the only explanation of her father's absence from her life had been that he was "away". After coming into possession of this manuscript, she embarked on a quest to find out more about her father, his life, his illness, and his death.

For the most part, Dr. Baird's manuscript had been about his experiences during his institutionalization in 1944. At that time, he had been suffering from manic-depressive disorder for almost a decade already and had been hospitalized a few times. In 1944, however, things got out of hand when he was admitted to Westborough State Hospital. The account of his stay in that institution is sickening. Throughout the first half of the book, I had to keep reminding myself that this had been real! These people existed. The doctors, the attendants, the nurses -- these people did not treat the patients like people, nor like patients. They were treated like criminals. And even criminals these days do not go through what the mentally ill patients went through then. Whether it was lack of knowledge of the illness itself, or the war that had hardened the hearts of these doctors and attendants is hard to say. All I could think of was how horrible it must have been to go through what these patients went through day after day after day. These patients were not there to be treated; they were there to be locked away from anything resembling normalcy. Dr. Baird was an intelligent man; a genius, you could say, and he understood his own condition very well. Being a physician himself, he knew the methods of "treatment" at Westborough were never going to do anyone any good, if not quite the opposite. In Dr. Baird's words:

...many patients entered Westborough in a state of mild mental illness but were made critically ill, or even hopelessly ill, by the procedures employed and the rough handling by nurses and attendants.

Have you seen horror movies or shows about insane asylums? Well, lets just say that the real condition and the treatment of mentally unstable people back in the 30's, 40's and 50's had been much worse than anything you've seen in any of these horror movies. The account of Dr. Baird's life in Westborough includes being in restraint for days, DAYS on, in straightjackets and cold packs, being made to lie in one's own urine and feces. This book is, by no means, for the faint hearted.

If the first half of the book was disturbing, the second half was just sad. Mimi Baird's discoveries about her father and the consequences of his illness on his life were heartbreaking. This man was a genius. Had he been born a couple of decades later, he could probably live a fairly normal life even with his illness, like most people suffering from bipolar disorder do these days. It wouldn't have been easy, but it would have been possible. This man was denied and rejected time after time, and yet, every time he stood back up, and fought for the things he believed in. Up until Westborough happened to him where he was completely broken by the doctors and attendants until he couldn't be a normal person anymore. He Wanted a Moon is a true, real life tragedy.

This was not a fun read. It was sad and sick and cruel. I would suggest this book to anyone interested in the medical field, especially psychological and/or neurological anomalies. Like I said, it's a true tragedy; so may be not everyone would like reading it, simply because the subject matter isn't an easy one to digest. However, it's a good book. A great one in fact, albeit disgustingly horrific at times. I took a star off because I feel like I'd have liked to learn a bit more about the life Dr. Baird had lived after receiving a lobotomy. The topic has been touched upon very briefly, and in my opinion, would have given the readers a little more insight on what his last years had been like had the author elaborated on it.

4 out of 5.

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Title: He Wanted the Moon (Buy on Amazon)
Author: Mimi Baird with Eve Claxton

Publisher: Broadway Books, February 16, 2016

Format: Paperback, 288 pages

Genre: Non-fiction, Adult, Biography, Memoir

Source/Disclaimer: I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review.