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.

A weave of gripping reportage and scientific detective story, Hidden Valley Road plumbs the heart-wrenching tragedies and surprising triumphs of the Galvins...in a page-turner.

Mimi’s heart, her image, and the gingerbread house are among the many broken things in Robert Kolker’s new book Hidden Valley Road. Named for the street the Galvins lived on in Colorado Springs, Kolker’s book splices the history of their family with an account of the gradual rise of genetic research in studying and treating mental illness.

... part multi-generational family saga, part medical mystery, written with an extraordinary blend of rigor and empathy. The reporter in Kolker seeks accuracy above all, but there’s a notable lack of judgment in the book that feels remarkable in light of the stigma long felt by those who have the condition in their families.

Kolker’s telling of the Galvin trials is at once deeply compassionate and chilling. He gives as much voice to the schizophrenic siblings as he does to their relatives, many of whom suffered tremendous psychological and sexual abuse from being in their orbit.

The author creates a powerfully humane portrait of those diagnosed with schizophrenia.

... engrossing.

... the Galvins...wanted...a book about their family because they ‘believed their story had something that could be of comfort to other people who are suffering’. I can’t quite work out why.

...a tour de force account of this devastating and mysterious medical malady – and the efforts of geneticists and neurobiologists to find a cure for it. Mr. Kolker takes us inside a family that seemed likely to take full advantage of post War II prosperity.

Scientists are grateful for the important research that has evolved from the Galvins. The author has done a masterful job in describing the family dynamics as well as psychiatry so that an armchair psychologist or someone who has done much research on this subject can glean value from reading this. This chilling, haunting saga rivals The Glass Castle, Sybil, Educated, and many other books as devastating as this. The book is easy to follow and every chapter has startling facts. Hidden Valley Road is bound to live on with readers long after they’ve turned the last page..

.. .[a] stunning, riveting chronicle crackling with intelligence and empathy.

... a powerful look at schizophrenia and the quest to understand it.

... a riveting and disquieting narrative.