Fugitive Minds by Antonio Melechi

by stephenpalmersf

I picked this up second hand in Hay-on-Wye because it looked interesting, and parts of it certainly are… but alas not the whole thing. For all the fascinating cases described in Melechi’s tour of mental maladies and conditions, the book is essentially a list of them (most of the chapters are really short) with no overall thesis or even much by way of the author’s character. Adding shame and love at the end was a step too far. Though written in 2003, the majority of the cases hark back to the nineteenth century, though a few more recent are mentioned. I enjoyed a few chapters of this book, but I finished it wondering what the point was.