Anna

New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1976. Book Club Edition . Hard Back. Good/Good. 5 1/2" x 8 1/2. Owner's name on front endpaper. Boards have gold spine lettering. Both the book and the dust jacket have some edge and corner wear. Interior is faultless. No marks or stamps. This is the harrowing story of a beautiful young woman's mental breakdown and descent into madness - and of her husband's decision to care for her at home, surrounded by her children, family, friends, and sensitive helpers, rather than permit her to be institutionalized and subjected to electro-shock therapy. Everybody meant well. From the family who wanted to save Anna's individuality and human dignity, to the doctors who thought that caring for her at home might work, to the psychoterapists, most of them of the Laingian persuasion, who thought that in the problem would disappear. but nothing disappeared. Instead cam pure horror, rape, attempted murder, and the agony of Anna's lingeering death from self-inflicted burns. Anna and David Reed are pseudonyms, but Anna is a tragically true story. Evere painfully revealing biograophical detail, every lacerating description of the inexorable destruction of Anna's life is recorded with defastating honesty. The names have been changed in order to protec the living; none of us, on reading this profoundly disturbing book, can know how we would behave if confronted by this appalling dilemma. David Reed is the pseudonmy of a British writer. Contents in Three Parts: Facing Madness, Origins, and The Trial.