Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself.
How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. Kolker tells their story with great compassion, burrowing inside the particular delusions and hospitalizations of each brother while chronicling the family’s. Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune The curse of the Galvin family is the stuff of Greek tragedy. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. Hidden Valley Road is destined to become a classic of narrative nonfiction. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins-aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony-and they worked hard to play their parts. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. "Reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness." -Oprah Winfrey Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream.
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