Tag: video review

Friant’s Video Friday: The Children of Red Peak by Craig DiLouie

Today Kim is bringing you a video review of The Children of Red Peak by Craig DiLouie.

The Children of Red Peak
Author:
Craig DiLouie

Published:  November 17, 2020
384 Pages

Reviewed By: Kim
Kim’s Rating: 4 stars

Book Description:

David Young, Deacon Price, and Beth Harris live with a dark secret. As children, they survived a religious group’s horrific last days at the isolated mountain Red Peak. Years later, the trauma of what they experienced never feels far behind.

When a fellow survivor commits suicide, they finally reunite and share their stories. Long-repressed memories surface, defying understanding and belief. Why did their families go down such a dark road? What really happened on that final night?

The answers lie buried at Red Peak. But truth has a price, and escaping a second time may demand the ultimate sacrifice.

Kim’s Video Review:

Purchase Links:
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Friant’s Video Friday: Book Review: Come Forth in Thaw by Jayson Robert Ducharme

Today Kim is bringing you a video review of Come Forth in Thaw by Jayson Robert Ducharme.
Come Forth in Thaw: A Dark Fantasy Horror Novella about Trauma and Mental Illness
Author: Jayson Robert Ducharme

Published: January 31, 2021
110 Pages

Reviewed By: Kim
Kim’s Rating: 3 stars

Book Description:

The Adrienne Forest State Park is one of many beautiful state parks in the White Mountains. It is a popular destination for tourists, painters, hikers and even weddings.

Yet the forest is also a place of great pain and torment, and is an equally popular destination to end your own life.

The only thing young mother Eleanor Jackson has left in her life is her son Alan-a troubled teenager who has gone to the forest to commit the unthinkable.

As Eleanor goes to find him in the forest, she witnesses bizarre and fantastical happenings that try to manipulate and distract her from rescuing her child.

When the sun goes down, the specters of the tormented emerge.

She will come to discover so much more than just her son.

Kim’s Video Review:

Purchase Links:
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Friant Video Friday: Book Review: Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals

Today Kim is bringing you a video review of the coffee table book Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals with photography by Christopher J.Payne and an essay by Oliver Sacks.

Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
Photographer:
Christopher J. Payne

Published: September 4, 2009
209 Pages

Reviewed By: Kim
Kim’s Rating: 5 stars

Book Description:

For more than half the nation’s history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients.

The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendent Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas.

Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings–and the patients who lived in them–neglected and abandoned.

Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some designed by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and crumbling interiors–chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home.

Accompanying Payne’s striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental hospital in his book Awakenings). Sacks pays tribute to Payne’s photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, “where one could be both mad and safe.”

Kim’s Video Review:

Purchase Links:
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