Reviews of Stevan Weine’s Work

Fans of the beat generation will be enlightened.

The author brings nuance to Allen’s views on mental illness, arguing that Allen had more ambivalent feelings about the anti-psychiatry movement than one might expect, and the author’s privileged access to material on the poet’s and Naomi’s institutionalizations make this a valuable resource for future biographers.

Publishers Weekly

Makes Ginsberg’s accomplishments more singular and more human

In Stevans’ telling of the Naomi story, one is suddenly aware that readers of Beat Literature never had a clear or comprehensible picture of Naomi’s hospitalization records and treatments….The richness of this story does not alter the eventual poetic output of Allen, but it makes Ginsberg’s accomplishments more singular and more human.

The Allen Ginsberg Project

A masterpiece of definitive and seminal scholarship

Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness will have a very special appeal to readers with an interest in the life and poetry of Allen Ginsberg… Best Minds is exceptionally well written, organized and presented — making it an inherently fascinating, informative, and insightful study.

Midwest Book Review

Combines biography, medical history, literary analysis, and memoir

Ginsberg’s long reckoning with mental illness deserves the sustained and sympathetic attention that Weine provides.

Gay & Lesbian Review

Praise of Stevan Weine’s Work

A Major Breakthrough

Stevan Weine’s biography of Allen Ginsberg is a major breakthrough in our understanding of this major American poet. With complete access to Ginsberg’s medical records, alongside interviews and other documents, Weine is able to construct the most complex account we have of Ginsberg’s struggle with madness, both his own and his mother’s, and to frame it within the history of American psychiatry and the pursuit of visionary poetry and experiences throughout Ginsberg’s career. Essential reading for anyone interested in the long history of madness in individuals, families, and cultures.

W. J. T. M I T C H E L L

Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor, English and Art History, University of Chicago; author of Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia

Breaks open long held secrets…Will spark many new conversations

Best Minds moved me very much. Weine’s research breaks open many long held secrets. His writing successfully relates how Allen’s experiences helped to change the general culture especially through his poems of madness.

Bob Rosenthal, Poet, Author of Straight Around Allen

A Unique Contribution

Dr. Weine takes a serious, detailed look at how Allen Ginsberg’s personal encounters with mental illness became integral to his poetry. Best Minds is a unique contribution to the critical and biographical work on this troubled and brilliant Beat Generation poet. The book presents a brisk challenge to ‘official’ notions of mental illness by way of poetry and anti-psychiatry. Its broad reach is also an enhancement to the growing field of literature and medicine.

Hassa Nmelehy, author of Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory
Best Minds is an immensely enjoyable and meticulous work of criticism: an investigation by a psychiatrist into a poet’s mental illness and his work, informed by access granted by the poet to the records of his eight-month psychiatric hospitalization and that of his mentally ill mother. Best Minds contains startling discoveries and groundbreaking analyses of journals, correspondence, poems, and psychotherapy progress notes. Weine documents Ginsberg’s poetic, psychiatric, and cultural experiences so thoroughly that the reader can participate in evaluating them. As a result, the challenges of mental illness and the poignancy of Ginsberg’s works come through like never before.
David v. Forrest, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry; Faculty, Psychoanalytic Institute; Consultant to Neurology, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons; Founding Editor, SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society
Allen Ginsberg’s decision to allow doctors to lobotomize his mother was a devastating one that he spent a lifetime trying to understand. Stevan Weine’s unprecedented access to Allen’s and Naomi’s psychiatric hospital records has provided a fresh understanding of the origins of ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’ and illuminates the great distance that Allen traveled from his uncertain, troubled youth to the acclaimed poet the world came to know. Best Minds is a crucial advancement in Ginsberg and Beat studies.
Michael Schumacher, Author of Dharma Lion
Stevan Weine met Allen Ginsberg when he was in medical school. His relationship with Ginsberg and his comprehensive research into Ginsberg’s poetry, experiences with mental illness., and his mother’s psychiatric treatment culminate in Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness. Weine, now a professor of psychiatry, received unprecedented access to Ginsberg’s personal archives as well as his and his mother’s psychiatric records.  He utilized these remarkable sources to reveal new dimensions of Ginsberg’s story. Weine’s keen analysis of Ginsberg’s journey make Best Minds an essential book for any student of 20th century poetry, human sexuality, and the American counterculture.
Jack Drescher, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University, Adjunct Professor, New York University, Training & Supervising Analyst, W.A. White Institute
This sympathetic and insightful account of Allen Ginsberg’s relationship to madness, psychiatrically-determined mental illness, and creativity is buttressed by the author’s exclusive access to Ginsberg’s psychiatric records, and those of his mother, Naomi Ginsberg –records that even Ginsberg himself never saw. A psychiatrist specializing in trauma who has also long nourished a personal interest in poetry, Stevan Weine makes a profound contribution to the emerging field of “mad studies” by demonstrating how a young poet with a dire prognosis from the psychiatric establishment and a fragile sense of self emerged as a mid-twentieth century cultural icon by turning the raw and genuinely anguishing materials of his “madness” into new directions in poetry, social relations, and values.
Maria Damon, University of Minnesota, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry
Best Minds will stand as a landmark study of creativity that can occur when an artist titrates a descent into madness while staying aware that this descent is also a strategy.  Stevan Weine shows Ginsberg’s writing to be more than a road trip narrative of sex, drugs, and lawlessness.  Rather, he chronicles Ginsberg’s life as a spiritual journey, from seeking revelation through visions and hallucinations, to redeeming lost lives by bearing witness to suffering, to restoring personhood for those whose lives had been erased by trauma, social exclusion, or mental illness, starting with his mother and her lobotomy. Through his poetry Ginsberg still can touch each of us.
James Griffith, University of Minnesota, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry

In Stevan Weine’s illuminating study, madness is no mere metaphor. Using Allen Ginsberg’s medical records and those of his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, Best Minds explores the secrets of Ginsberg’s experiences with madness providing a refreshing new look at his most famous poem “Howl” and expanding what we know of the poet’s life. Ginsberg, who consented for Naomi’s lobotomy, would speak of the lack of tenderness in the mindset of mid-century America, and then write about new hopes and liberations. Best Minds offers an in-depth look at a bygone era of radical medical solutions to human problems, and one gifted individual’s suffering, guilt, survival, poetry, and optimism.

Regina Weinreich, Department of Humanities & Sciences, The School of Visual Arts, author of The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction