9 Highland Road - by Michael Winerip (Paperback)

About the Book

In an age of shrinking state budgets and sophisticated antipsychotic medications, supervised group homes have become the backbone of America's beleaguered mental health system. This keenly gripping book takes readers inside one such home--situated at 9 Highland Road in Glen Cove, New York--and into the lives of its residents, their families and counselors.

Book Synopsis

Before Julie Callahan came to the house at 9 Highland Road in Glen Cove, New York, she had spent a good part of her young life in mental hospitals, her mental and emotional coherence nearly destroyed by a childhood of sexual abuse. Fred Grasso, a schizophrenic, had lived in a filthy single-room occupancy hotel. At 9 Highland Road they and their housemates were given a decent alternative to lives in institutions or in the streets. It was a place in which some even found the chance to get better.

This perfectly observed and passionately imagined book takes us inside one of the supervised group homes that, in an age of shrinking state budgets and psychotropic drugs, have emerged as the backbone of America's mental health system. As it follows the progress and setbacks of residents, their families, and counselors and notes the embittered resistance their presence initially aroused in the neighborhood, 9 Highland Road succeeds in opening the locked world of mental illness. It does so with an empathy and insight that will change forever the way we understand and act in relation to that world.

Review Quotes

"Captures the hypocrisy that seems to typify the way Americans have traditionally dealt with the mentally ill.... The best disguise for cruelty, you realize as you read this remarkable, persuasive book, is normality."

-- New Yorker

"As in the works of Robert Coles or James Agee, the devastating evidence ... comes from Winerip's total immersion in his subject.... He brings ... a dramatist's or novelist's acute sensibilities to the page."

-- Boston Globe

About the Author

Michael Winerip has been a staff writer, investigative reporter, national political correspondent, Metro reporter, and deputy Metro editor for The New York Times. In 2000, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his expose in the Times Magazine about a mentally ill New York City man pushng a woman to her death on the subway. In 2001, he played a leading role on the team of reporters who won a Pulitzer for the series "How Race Is Lived in America." His book on community mental health, 9 Highland Road, was a finalist for the PEN nonfiction award.