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Summary
Summary
Christopher (Kit) Lukas's mother committed suicide when he was a boy. He and his brother, Tony, were not told how she died. The family's history of depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide stretched back years, but no one spoke of it. The legacy of guilt and grief haunted Kit and Tony throughout their lives. Both brothers achieved remarkable success, Tony as a gifted journalist, Kit as an accomplished television producer and director. After suffering bouts of depression, Kit was able to confront his family's troubled past, drawing on his experience to write Silent Grief, an invaluable guide to surviving a loved one's suicide. Tony forged a sterling career, eventually winning two Pulitzer Prizes, including one for the now classic Common Ground, But he never found the satisfaction and contentment Kit had attained; he remained creative but depressed. In 1997, shortly before the publication of his acclaimed book Big Trouble, Tony committed suicide. BLUE GENES portrays the lives of two brothers who alternately locked horns and found solace in each other. Written with heartrending candor, it captures the devastation of this family legacy of depression, but it is also surprisingly uplifting, as it details the strength and hope that can provide a way of escaping depression's grasp.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In a supremely brave effort literally to save his own life, Lukas shatters the silence surrounding the long history of suicide in his Hungarian-German-Jewish family, especially that of his older brother, J. Anthony Lukas (Tony). Depression and what is now diagnosed as bipolar disorder hounded various family members, most notably the brothers' beautiful college-educated actress mother, Elizabeth, whose deepening depression, exacerbated no doubt by the sense of guilt and inadequacy in her marriage, led her to cut her own throat in 1941, when the boys were just six and eight. Lukas writes with the reassuring sagacity of hindsight, knowing the negative long-term effects of his mother's mental illness on his brother especially, but at the time her death was mysterious and devastating, and the brothers' relationship grew mutually needy and protective, on the one hand, and fractious and competitive, on the other. Feelings of betrayal, guilt and rage erupted at points during the successful careers for both brothers--Tony as a driven journalist with the New York Times and author (Common Ground) who won two Pulitzer prizes; and Christopher (Kit), an Emmy Award-winning TV producer, author and actor. For Tony, however, who married late, remained childless and took antidepressants, his illness was debilitating, leading him to suicide in 1997. In clear, forceful prose, the author attempts to make sense of these calamities and assert a life-affirming purpose. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Lukas was 6 years old and his brother 8 when their mother committed suicide. She was 33 years old and had for years, in the 1930s, suffered mental illness before diagnosis and treatment of manic depression were available. Their father, who himself disappeared into a TB sanitarium for a few years, didn't tell the brothers the truth about their mother's death for 10 years. Their fragile family, which included an overbearing grandmother, never fully recovered from the suicide and the secret of depression that would eventually claim the lives of other family members. Theirs were lives of estrangement and a host of residual anxieties. Finally coming to grips with his family's history, Lukas wrote Silent Grief (1997), a guide to surviving a loved one's suicide. The irony is that the book did not help his brother, Tony, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with the New York Times, who took his own life. A completely absorbing look at a family with a history of depression and one man's struggle to overcome the legacy of suffering and grief.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE title of this memoir alludes to the tendency among the author's family members to kill themselves, and in particular to the suicide of the memoirist's brother, whose depression seems to have made him feel that a book he had written, which was about to come out, wasn't good enough. The memoirist, for his part, informs us that "every morning, for many years, I have awakened, thinking: 'I'm ready to kill myself.'" In an "Envoi" to the memoir, written as it was going to press, the memoirist informs us that Susan, his wife - whose "irrepressible joshing" lifted his spirits for 30-odd years - has suddenly died. I have never thought much of Holden Caulfield's notion that a good book makes you want to call the author on the phone, but this is a book that makes you feel you should call the author and ask him to reassure you that he is O.K. It is with great relief, then, that I can in all candor recommend "Blue Genes" (its title aside), on its merits. Its unusual merits. In a memoir these days we have come to expect a great read, a gripping yarn and profound doubt (sometimes even on the memoirist's part) as to how much of it is true. ("True" being defined as what the memoirist genuinely believes did happen.) "Blue Genes," on the contrary, is oddly jointed and frequently goofy, and I believed every word of it. Well, except for the baseball angle, which we will come to. Christopher Lukas's big brother, J. Anthony Lukas, was an idol to a generation of younger reporters. As a New York Times correspondent he won the major journalism awards. Then, on his own, in 1985, he won the important book awards with "Common Ground," about racial struggles in Boston. In 1997 he became an acclaimed historian, posthumously. "Big Trouble," about class warfare out west around the turn of the 20th century, had been nine years in the writing. The Times called it an "opulent, lavishly detailed ... magnificent piece of work, a stunning, monumental achievement." Three months before its publication date, Tony Lukas had strangled himself with his bathrobe cord. Why? As Christopher puts it, "Blue Genes" doesn't provide "'the answer" that people want to hear." It does work up a convincing complex of factors. The boys' mother was beautiful, theatrical and regretfully loving-impaired. Her protracted off-and-on affair with her high school headmaster, beginning in her teens, cast a pall over her marriage to the boys' father. Soon after Tony was born, she tried to kill herself. In a sanitarium, she composed a third-person autobiography that includes this chilling bit: "When they brought Tony to see her she wept bitterly, only because she felt nothing." When Tony was 9 and Christopher, called Kit, was 7, the mother slashed her wrists and throat and bled to death. The boys were kept away at camp and then sent to boarding school. Nobody explained anything to them. Their father drank. He spent a good deal of their childhood hospitalized with tuberculosis. When he did manage to make time for them, he barked. Once he made Kit cry. "'He's afraid of you,' said my brother, revealing the dirty little secret for the first time. "Dad appeared astonished. 'Afraid? Why?' ... "The magical thinking of childhood had perverted my reasoning into two choices: either I had been responsible for my mother's death, or he had. ... "If he was responsible for Mother's death, I was furious at him, but afraid of his power. If I was responsible for her death, he was going to kill me for that. "He sat there, stunned at my tears. " 'You don't ever have to be afraid of me," he said. 'There's nothing I would ever do to hurt you.' I didn't answer. " 'Don't you know that no matter what you did, I would always love you?' "He had said this many times, and all it did was reinforce my childish belief that I had done something wrong. "He shrugged his shoulders in helpless confusion." That is Christopher at his affecting, therapy-imbued but unsimplistic best. "Children are resilient," he says with authority, "or at least they appear to be." He is a co-author, with a psychologist friend, of "Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide," a book for survivors. He didn't like "Common Ground." The brothers were ever an odd couple. When they were little kids, Christopher writes, "I was fair and curly haired and ran everywhere after Mother. Tony was deep and dark and troubled, his sallow coloration and furrowed brows signaling troubled inner thoughts." As an adult, he writes, "I was hopeful (though not always optimistic) that life could take a wonderful turn for the better, almost magically. Tony was confident that nothing could create good outcomes except hard work, diligence and attention to detail." Kit could be clingy, Tony distant. Tony never liked talking about their shared traumas. When Kit tried to discuss his psychosomatically nervous stomach in clinical detail, Tony put him off: "I try to take these things in stride." If Tony was Oscar Madison, Kit is Felix Ungar. He writes that Tony was not a natural athlete. "Only when he played second base or shortstop did his longtime love of the game of baseball enable him to fire a hardball straight to first, angling for a double play." That, in several respects, is Ungaresque. You don't say "fire a hardball," certainly not in connection with a double play. And lurchy boys like Tony do not gravitate, if their teammates can help it, to the rangy, pivotal positions of shortstop and second base. A few pages later, Christopher refers to an anthology, "Birth of a Fan," in which Tony is one of several contributors recalling early baseball memories. I have a copy of that book. Rooting for the Yankees, Tony writes, provided "a buttress to my self-esteem, a substitute family." As a player, however, he knew his limitations - he was a third baseman who would "stand there as balls ricocheted off my chest and arms, scrambling to retrieve them in time for a desperate heave to first." It doesn't take sports to bring out Christopher's sappy side. "As a newcomer to a room full of people," he tells us, "I crept along the edges. Everyone seemed, if not hostile, then supremely blah about my presence." His prose often cries out for a dose of Tony's diligence: "Like many adventures, scary during the episode, our eventual safety provided all of us with a sense of derring-do in years to come." Among his impressions of a Mexican fiesta is this one: "Tacos, frying over charcoal, summoned the juices of thousands of stomachs." Tony and Kit visited an Acapulco bordello together. "I still feel badly" about the experience, Christopher says, and "not just because I was contributing to a deleterious way of life." We can hear Oscar/Tony spluttering. But if Kit can be an exasperating writer, with a penchant for the passive or intransitive voice ("Few words of praise had come my way from him"), he is always personal, always trying earnestly to understand, and his book makes a persuasive case for Felix's relative sanity. Fretting beats brooding. When the boys fought, "though Tony was at least 10 pounds heavier than I, there was something of the desperate scrapper about me. I could hang on with my nails or teeth or legs while being pummeled." Ultimately, Kit couldn't hold Tony, but he has held on to life, and to the story of a lifetime his big brother couldn't cover. After their mother's suicide, the Lukas brothers were sent to boarding school. Nobody explained anything to them. Roy Blount Jr.'s latest book, "Alphabet Juice," will be published next month.
Kirkus Review
Elegant account of a family's persistent melancholy and the damage it wrought. When Lukas (Silent Grief, 1988) was six, his brilliant, mercurial and horribly depressed mother Elizabeth killed herself. When he was 62, his older brother, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony, committed suicide on the eve of the publication of his second book (Big Trouble, 1997). The author's uncle killed himself in his early 70s; Lukas's grandmother did the same in her 80s. After years of trying to make sense of his mother's death, which her sons didn't know was a suicide until years later, the author was faced with another mystery to unravel. In their childhood, he and his brother had never been close, or even similar. Tony took after their mother in temperament and coloring, inheriting the "blue genes"; Christopher (Kit) was known as "Master Sunshine." After Elizabeth's death, the boys were raised by their domineering but adoring grandmother and their elegant, but largely absent father Edwin. As they aged, Kit and Tony grew farther apart, until at times the damage to their relationship seemed irreparable. Lukas's recital of the family's depressed history includes an account of his mother's affair with an older, married man, which began when she was 13 and ended just before her marriage to Edwin. It provides a child's-eye view of Elizabeth's death and moves into the brothers' adulthood, when Tony became increasingly successful and unmoored. The more celebrated he was, his brother writes, the greater his need for admiration: "Tony's prizes and the thousands of plaudits for his work didn't fill up the hole in his soul." As Kit achieved his own success, he too realized how ultimately unsatisfying it could be. Lukas movingly chronicles his own struggle to understand the darkness he suspects inside himself as well as the suicides of loved ones unable to cope with that darkness. Sweet, sad and sobering. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Christopher and Tony Lukas's mother committed suicide when they were very young, but the boys were never told how she died--silence was the family's policy on its legacy of mental illness. Regardless, both brothers achieved great success in their fields (the author is a TV producer and director), and their bond was loving but fraught. Sadly, Tony, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his journalism, committed suicide in 1997. Those interested in how mental illness afflicts generations and how to find strength and hope in the face of it will find this remarkably honest memoir resonant. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/08.]--EB (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.