100 Books Like Asylum

A ground-breaking memoir, this book recounts Elyn Saks’s journey through the depths of schizophrenia while forging a remarkable career as a legal scholar. Saks, diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia during her college years, offers an unflinching account of her psychotic breaks, hospitalizations, and the constant battle to stay grounded in reality.

Yet, her story is one of resilience and hope, showing that a fulfilling life with schizophrenia is possible. Saks’s narrative is both personal and educational, offering insight into the lived experience of mental illness while advocating for compassion and understanding. Her bravery was what captured my attention. Her no-holds-barred personal story gives hope to everyone who has been given a devastating diagnosis of schizophrenia.

I found myself returning to the resonant images again and again. The book presents pictures of a young man’s mother throughout her life before her mental illness, and with it, and includes some bits of narrative, letters from her and from his father.

These exerpts allowed me to construct the story of a family’s tragedy, the evolution of a beautiful young woman into someone else, someone who was still, nevertheless, painfully loved. One of the typewritten paragraphs begins, “Right after you were born, your mother believed she had fallen in love with someone else.”

I felt the young photographer’s mission to understand and hold his love for his imperfect parents driving the book. It was not put together for me, the reader, but out of a driving necessity. We are nevertheless allowed to witness the young man’s struggle and evolution.

In 1995, in the attic of a decommissioned mental hospital in New York State, a curator of New York State Museum, a local volunteer, a psychiatrist/ documentarian, and a photographer found a trove of suitcases, doctor’s bags, steamer trunks with Chinese motif, housekeys, photographs, earrings, belts, upright ladies Saratoga trunks (“so named because they could hold enough clothes for an entire summer season in the resort town of Saratoga Springs.")

The researchers ventured further into the hospital's now vacant sites, an abandoned bowling alley, and its burial grounds. Finally, they obtained permission to get a few hours with the medical records, which were stored in an abandoned hospital building contaminated with asbestos and lead, requiring them to don protective gear and booties.

Their hope was to bring the forgotten patients who’d spent years in the institution back to life. This book and its intricate details haunted me. There are so… show more.

This is a book in which I have underlines on almost every page. It’s the story of the development of Psychiatry — the whole field — in the United States; in this case, there really is a story. One man, Thomas Kirkbride, the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, largely determined the course of how we first thought about and treated mental illness in America. His vision became the template for the large state institutions erected according to his model.

Steeped in the ideals of the European protocol of “moral treatment,” Kirkbride believed to the end that mental illness could be cured with nature, safe containment, music, art, reading, good food, and a slowed-down, kinder life. 

I wish I’d written this book. I’ve always been fascinated by instructional guides for amateur photographers and the rules they set out to get a ‘good picture.’ I’ve followed many of these rules myself over the years, but what this great book shows is that the rules are constantly changing.

What made a good picture in 1930 is not the same as in 1950 or 1970. This book tells this story in fifty short and punchy chapters, and it has great pictures on virtually every page.

As a kid, I wanted to be Lauren Bacall when I grew up. I watched To Have and Have Not almost weekly, emulating her sultry moves as “Slim” and wishing that I too could one day undermine the Nazis in a little black dress.  

I don’t regret my choice of teenage role model, but I do wish I had known about Lee Miller back then, who would have offered a real-life example of a femme fatale fighting for good with her talents. However, rather than grit and charm, Miller used her camera to expose the true cost of fascism. 

Carolyn Burke's biography takes us on an extraordinary journey through Miller’s life—from her days as a model to her work as a war correspondent. Miller had an uncanny ability to connect with the subjects of her photographs, creating a bridge between their world and ours.

During World War II, Miller’s work… show more.

These days, you take a picture and see it right away, but when I started taking snapshots, I’d shoot a roll of film, take it down to the photo developer, and wait a day or two to get my snaps back. They always came in a photo wallet, and opening it was a big part of the ritual of finding out how my pictures turned out.

I also used the wallet to store them and still have lots of them from the 1990s and early 2000s. Annebella Pollen’s great little book takes me back to that time and shows me the evolution of those wallets over almost a hundred years, and the care that went into designing them.

Traveling is a time when you often need to entertain a bored child on a train, plane, or in a car. This book has tons of great games, puzzles, stickers, and even cultural information that will educate your child. Lots of photography and illustrations to entertain, as well. A good mix of education and fun.

As the legendary curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski was instrumental in elevating photography’s stature to an equal among the fine arts. He is eloquent in his explanation about the meaning of photography and illuminating in his descriptions of each of the one hundred photographs published in this book from MoMA’s sterling collection of photographs. There is no better guide to an awakening of your own eye than Szarkowski.

I’ve always loved the portraits the photographer Félix Nadar made of nineteenth-century Parisian celebrities such as Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.

I went to this book—Nadar’s memoir—to learn more about the making of those pictures. There is a little bit of that, but what really gripped me was the weird and wonderful shaggy dog stories Nadar tells about his adventures in ‘aerostatic photography’—taking pictures from balloons.

Spoiler alert: there is a lot of crashing.