Howard Dully

I wasn't going to review this book, but the issues that it brought to mind by its conclusion were more than enough to inspire me to write about it.

I could have called this review My Lobotomy, which is the title of the book and which I know is eye catching. But for me, the question that is asked of the author after a groundbreaking NPR story was done on him gets to the heart of why the book is so important and why I am writing this review. "How could this happen?" This is, sadly, a question that can be asked of many aspects of our society and which is too rarely asked.

I was browsing at my local library and saw the title My Lobotomy. When you see a title like that it's like when you hear the screech of brakes and the sound of metal hitting metal. You know there is a car wreck and you know there's something you probably shouldn't want to gawk at but you just can't help yourself. The title of the book is like that. I had no idea what the book was, but I felt compelled to check it out.

It sat around awhile until I had finished a few other books I was working on, but then I picked it up. It is largely the memoirs of Howard Dully who was, at age 12, given a "transorbital lobotomy" by none other than Dr. Walter Freeman, the man who made transoribital lobotomies chic. This is the third memoir I have recently read where it is clear that the author has such a literal mind that you know what you are reading is the solid truth as the author sees it. The first such memoir I read was Grief of my Heart (which I reviewed here), the memoirs of a Chechen physician who lived through the two Chechen wars. The Chechen/Russia conflict has so many twists and turns and distortions that when you read anything about it you have to look for the bias of the author. Yet this book rang true. My wife's comment on this book was that she felt the author was not very imaginative and that he was telling the brutal truth about what he lived through. I felt the same. The power of the story was enhanced by the fact the author seemed so literal. The second memoir I recently read that had that same literal, unvarnished truth feel to it was A Long Way Gone, the memoirs of a child soldier from Sierra Leone who now lives in New York. This is a book I have been meaning to review for months now but haven't gotten up the emotional energy to do so.