Pharmakon

Bibliothèque	Type de document	Numéro de cote topographique	Nombre d'enregistrements enfants	Emplacement	Statut	Réservations du document
Recherche en cours... Central	Book	813.54 22	1	Stacks	Recherche en cours... Inconnu	Recherche en cours... Indisponible
Recherche en cours... South	Book	813.54 22	1	Stacks	Recherche en cours... Inconnu	Recherche en cours... Indisponible

'I was born because a man came to kill my father. If he hadn't showed up with a gun in his pocket and bad thoughts in his head, I wouldn't exist, much less have a story to tell. This tragic footnote to my conception left me feeling as if I had three parents- a father, a mother, and a murderer.'

William Friedrich, an ambitious professor of psychology at Yale in 1952, has stumbled upon a drug that promises happiness - and that can make him a famous man. When his experiment goes awry, and a research subject commits murder, the consequences will haunt him and his family forever.

Pharmakon is an epic novel, an invocation of the quest for bliss, for love, for family, and all of the betrayals that follow. We follow the Friedrichs from the well-ordered suburban life of post-war America through the chaos and freedom of the counterculture, into the drug-fuelled, media-crazed eighties and beyond. In William Friedrich, Wittenborn has defined the archetypal American patriarch- a miracle worker and source of strength to everyone except those he loves the most. Pharmakon is also a layered, thoughtful search behind the veil of psychopharmacology as we know it today - a tale not only of the consequences of research, but also of the complex personalities, appetites, and struggles that created it.

Honest, insightful, and ruefully funny, Pharmakon captures formative moments of the twentieth century, the quirks of an American family, and will enthral fans of the novels of John Irving.

Critiques (4)

Critique du Publishers Weekly

In this ambitious but flawed novel about drug makers and drug takers, Wittenborn (Fierce People) unfurls the cautionary story of Dr. Will Friedrich, a psychopharmacologist at Yale in 1951, who teams up with a female psychiatrist to test an experimental mood-enhancing drug extracted from a leaf used by New Guinea witch doctors. Will tests the new med on a suicidal freshman, Casper Gedsic, and Casper's resulting homicidal outbreak will trouble Will for the rest of his life. Zach, the narrator and youngest Friedrich boy (conceived in the wake of Casper's freakout), comes of age during the tail end of the '60s, has a truncated brush with writerly success and cops a crippling habit. He and his three siblings end up disappointing Will as their lives run counter to his ambitions for them: daughters Fiona and Lucy forgo lucrative careers for more fulfilling lifestyles (Fiona becomes a painter, Lucy an aid worker), and Willy drops out of prelaw to study art. Unfortunately, the fates of the Friedrich children are of much less dramatic interest than that of their father, and as the novel shifts focus to their travails, this dysfunctional family narrative disappointingly peters out into irresolution. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Critique de Kirkus

A novel of psychopharmacological experimentation, revenge and family tragedy. Wittenborn (Fierce People, 2002) re-creates Yale in the early 1950s as psychologist William Friedrich enters into a lab partnership with Dr. Bunny Winton, an exotic colleague who during the war had been developing some expertise with gai kau dong (aka GKD), a hallucinogen used by cannibal tribes in New Guinea. The scientists' suspicion is that this chemical substance might be able to be refined as an antidepressant, so Winton and Friedrich enter into a professional relationship in which rather surreptitiously they try out GKD on an experimental and a control group. While this is supposedly a double-blind experiment, Friedrich makes sure that the substance is given to Casper Gedsic, a brilliant, socially inept and perhaps sociopathic freshman at Yale. Shortly after Casper's personality changes, seemingly for the better (he loses his stammer, his shyness and his virginity), he brutally murders Dr. Winton and Dr. Friedrich's young son, Jack. Although he's caught and admitted to a hospital for the criminally insane, Friedrich abruptly changes the course of his life by moving his family to New Jersey (he gets a tenured professorship at Rutgers). While he teaches and works as a consultant to pharmaceutical firms there, he wills himself to forget the abortive experiment at Yale, and he and his wife even have another child, Zach, to "replace" the murdered Jack. Casper escapes from the hospital, however, and makes his presence known to the Friedrichs, who can never quite extricate themselves from the psychopathological shadow he casts, one that Friedrich may unwittingly have helped create. The novel then follows the shifting fortunes of the Friedrich family, especially the self-destructive Zach, who undermines his promise and creativity by becoming a drug addict. While the novel as a whole is a bit unfocused, the first part is a compulsive read and even after the narrative shifts to a dysfunctional family dynamic, Wittenborn holds the reader by examining Friedrich as a complex and sometimes monstrous paterfamilias. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Critique de Booklist

*Starred Review* It is 1951, and Will Friedrich, a young, ambitious, untenured Yale psychology professor is searching for a Big Idea, one that could make the world a saner place. Tragically, his big idea turns a geeky freshman genius into a murderer, and the specter of the event haunts Will's family for 50 years. Pharmakon is a family saga that takes Will, his wife, Nora, and their four children through the watershed moments of five turbulent decades of American history. But it is also a great deal more; by turns, a knowing and slightly jaundiced send-up of academia, a guided tour through some of the worst ideas of twentieth-century medicine and psychology, and an insightful portrait of a brilliant, decent, caring (albeit ambitious) man whose best efforts earn the approval of nearly everyone except those most important to him. Pharmakon is a big book in every way except page count. It is filled with vivid, nuanced characters and with ideas, and Wittenborn's engaging writing recalls Richard Russo.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2008 Booklist

Critique du Library Journal

The jacket copy for Wittenborn's latest novel proclaims the contents within to be "an epic novel about family secrets and the consequences of ambition." Unfortunately, what lies between the covers is epic only in its absolute failure as a novel of both substance and entertainment. The basic plot conceit is interesting: a professor of psychology at Yale has to cope with a murderous research subject. The writing, however, is clumsy and derivative, riddled with cliches and plot holes so large one doesn't care whether the family's secrets are revealed at all. And when they are, it is a huge disappointment. The author is an Emmy Award-nominated producer, and perhaps he would have better luck turning his premise into a screenplay. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries only. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/08.]--Christopher Bussmann, Pratt Inst. Lib., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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