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Top of the pile
78
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
68/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Robert Kolker
Publisher:
Doubleday
Date:
April 7, 2020
Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?
What The Reviewers Say
Kolker carefully reconstructs the story of the household falling into bedlam as the strong, athletic brothers warred with their demons and one another in flights of violent rage, each one slipping further away.
...a...feat of empathy and narrative journalism.
Mr. Kolker’s riveting, compassionate Hidden Valley Road tells the story of a family besieged by devastating mental illness.
In this fascinating yet deeply disturbing book, the journalist Robert Kolker burrows deep into the issue of nature versus nurture. As with his previous outing, Lost Girls , about a series of murders on Long Island, it’s a work of precise reportage: he spoke to all the surviving members of the Galvin family, including matriarch Mimi before her death in 2017, creating a startlingly intimate account of a family ruptured from within by forces they could not control. From the name of the Galvins’ street to their love of falconry, an exercise in controlling wildness, the material often has an uncanny, novelistic quality. At times it’s reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides : an all-American family, an inexplicable contagion, a malignant turning inwards, all against a backdrop of respectable conformity.
