I felt immediate empathy for Mimi Baird and her desire to know the physician father who "disappeared" from her life when she was 6 years old, and was dead 15 years later at the age of 55. Despite only having a few years with him, there is an indelible bond between father and daughter, a sense of loss that haunts Mimi throughout her life, and the writing and publication of this book was her "quest to know him." The book includes a fascinating and substantial manuscript written by her father in the 1940s which describes in excruciating detail his (mis)treatment as a manic depressive by a state mental institution. Dr. Perry Baird's account swings from the voice of a brilliant Harvard-educated physician examining his own illness ("the brutalities one encounters in state and city psychopathic hospitals must be the by-product of the fear and superstition with which mentally ill patients are regarded") to the voice of a seriously delusional man in the throes of his manic-depression. The book as a whole, however, feels a bit piecemeal and incomplete. In the end, I was left wanting more even though I knew that Mimi Baird had given us everything she had - it just wasn't that much. I received a copy of this book from the BookBrowse First Impressions program in exchange for an honest review.

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He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter's Quest to Know Him by Mimi Baird and Eve Claxton is a heartbreaking story of bipolar disorder and its devastating effect on a patient and a family. This book is in part excerpts from Dr. Baird's journal from the 1940s. The realities of his illness are all the more harsh heard through his own voice.

Read my complete review at: http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2015/02/he-wanted-moon-madness-and-medical.html

Reviewed for LibraryThing Early Reviewers program

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