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The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity ( ISBN 1-58322-543-9) is a 1975 memoir by Mark Vonnegut, son of American writer Kurt Vonnegut, about Mark's experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery. After his recovery, he undertook the study of medicine and orthomolecular medicine, although he later disavowed the latter.
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier which is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.
Mark Vonnegut is an American pediatrician and memoirist. He is the son of writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and his first wife, Jane Cox. He is the brother of Edith Vonnegut and Nanette Vonnegut. He described himself in the preface to his 1975 book as "a hippie, son of a counterculture hero, BA in religion, genetic disposition to schizophrenia."
The foreword was written by Kurt Vonnegut, who said, "his [Mark Vonnegut's] wish is to tell people who are going insane something about the shape of the roller coaster they are on."
The Eden Express is an autobiographical account of Mark's years immediately after college, his thoughts, experiences and descent into and eventual emergence from mental illness. It starts with the words, "June 1969: Swarthmore Graduation. The night before, someone had taken white paint and painted "Commence What?" on the front of the stage." It continues with an account of his journey in a VW Bug to the wilds of British Columbia to build a commune with his girlfriend and college friends. The book continues until two years later, on Valentine's Day, 1971, Vonnegut had suffered from a psychotic episode and was committed to Woodlands Psychiatric Hospital in New Westminster,[ citation needed ] about 10 days after taking mescaline, which left him unable to sleep and uninterested in eating. He was diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia.
Swarthmore College is a private liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, Swarthmore was one of the earliest coeducational colleges in the United States. It was established to be a college "...under the care of Friends, at which an education may be obtained equal to that of the best institutions of learning in our country." By 1906, Swarthmore had dropped its religious affiliation and became officially non-sectarian.
The Volkswagen Beetle—officially the Volkswagen Type 1, informally in German the Käfer, in parts of the English-speaking world the Bug, and known by many other nicknames in other languages—is a two-door, rear-engine economy car, intended for five occupants, that was manufactured and marketed by German automaker Volkswagen (VW) from 1938 until 2003.
British Columbia is the westernmost province of Canada, located between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. With an estimated population of 5.016 million as of 2018, it is Canada's third-most populous province.
The New York Times describes the book as:[ citation needed ]
The New York Times is an American newspaper based in New York City with worldwide influence and readership. Founded in 1851, the paper has won 125 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper. The Times is ranked 17th in the world by circulation and 2nd in the U.S.
Mark Vonnegut’s depiction of his descent into, and eventual emergence from, mental illness. As a recent college graduate, self-avowed hippie, and son of a counterculture hero, Vonnegut begins to experience increasingly delusional thinking, suicidal thoughts, and physical incapacity. In February 1971 he is committed to a psychiatric hospital… (an) honest, thoughtful, and moving account of the illness of schizophrenia. Required reading for those who want to understand insanity from the inside.
A hippie is a member of the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The term hippie first found popularity in San Francisco with Herb Caen, who was a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
The book was translated into Swedish as Express till paradiset.[ citation needed ] It was also translated into Polish as Eden express (transl. Sherill Howard Pociecha i Lech Janerka, Wrocław/Breslau 1992) and into German as Eden Express - Die Geschichte meines Wahnsinns (transl. Johann Christoph Maass), Berlin 2014. [1]
Swedish is a North Germanic language spoken natively by 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden, and in parts of Finland, where it has equal legal standing with Finnish. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to some extent with Danish, although the degree of mutual intelligibility is largely dependent on the dialect and accent of the speaker. Both Norwegian and Danish are generally easier for Swedish speakers to read than to listen to because of difference in accent and tone when speaking. Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. It has the most speakers of the North Germanic languages.
Polish is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group. It is spoken primarily in Poland and serves as the native language of the Poles. In addition to being an official language of Poland, it is also used by Polish minorities in other countries. There are over 50 million Polish language speakers around the world and it is one of the official languages of the European Union.
Lech Janerka is a Polish songwriter, vocalist, and bassist. In the 1980s he was leader of a notable Polish post-punk/new wave band called Klaus Mitffoch, based in Wrocław.
