He Wanted the Moon (Baird) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
An extraordinary Möbius strip of a book.... Autobiography, biography, science, history and literature all in one, as instructive as any textbook and utterly impossible to put down...The text of Dr. Baird’s manuscript is haunting. The tone is one a suspense writer might struggle to sustain: The most unreliable of narrators, Dr. Baird is objective, charming, humorous, then suddenly just a little off, and then flat-out gone, leaving an irrational stranger in his place. The reader can almost watch the circuits in his brain surge and dim just as, Ms. Baird reports, the handwriting in the manuscript morphed from disciplined to disorderly and back again.
Abigail Zuger, M.D - New York Times


Extraordinary...a remarkably eloquent account of mental illness, reminiscent of Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted. Perry Baird emerges as thoughtful and at times eerily aware of his condition as well as his inability to elude either its symptoms or the primitive treatments for them…. The elder Baird’s narrative is cinematic, featuring Ratched-like nurses and an escape scene straight out of The Fugitive.... [Dr. Baird] never really knew his daughter—or her achievement in telling this story.
Nora Krug - Washington Post


Baird’s lonely, angry, grief-stricken, and occasionally grandiose account of his illness and its shattering costs is the reason we can’t put [this book] down. His sharply detailed recollections are sometimes sane and sometimes not, but his writing is lucid even when his thinking isn’t. His manuscript is a plea to understand his experience and, by extension, others.
Laura Collins-Hughes - Boston Globe


Perry Baird was a pioneer in attempting to understand the workings of manic depression…In bringing her father’s harrowing, tragic, and moving story to life, Mimi Baird celebrates him and gives voice to the terrible suffering the mentally ill once endured, and still do today, and challenges the prejudices and misperceptions the public continues to have about the disease.
Publishers Weekly


Through this moving memoir, Baird slowly brings her father back to life and reveals the sordid history of treating mental illness.
Bookpage


Astonishing in its illuminations....This striking and poignant family story evokes compassion for everyone affected by this cruel malady."
Booklist


Moving...[Baird] sketches the life of a man who had done brilliantly in college and medical school—even co-authoring a paper with the eminent physiologist Walter Cannon—but who would be felled by psychosis...A sobering account of how little we knew and how much we still have to learn about mental illness—especially how not to treat it.
Kirkus Reviews