Customer Reviews

3 reviews

• Paul Skerritt

  One can be wary of medical autobiographies which have a tendency to be boring, pretentious and badly written. Happily, this autobiography is none of these; it is engaging, interesting and beautifully written. The author identifies himself as a ‘baby boomer’. Even for those who are not ‘baby boomers’, the setting of the first part of the book in Australia of the fifties is a familiar one and it deserves to be recorded. I suspect that, apart from the world war, Australian society had not changed in the previous 50 years compared with the massive changes in the 50 years since.
  Similarly, I think that the environment of medical practice and education then represented the end of an era and would be incomprehensible to the modern medical reader. This enhances the educational value of the book.
  The view of the eras in the South Australian and Tasmanian communities is through the eyes of a distinguished
  academic psychiatrist and an extraordinary family. There is a great deal of entertainment in the many personal recollections studded with quotations.
  The author’s beginnings would have to be described as disadvantaged and his personal efforts to surmount them heroic although he did not quite describe it that way. The descriptions of his eccentric parents were always sympathetic, while bitterness is an attitude that is more familiar to psychiatrists. The author could easily have sunk under the weight of his background but managed to swim through it. But this is too much serious psychiatry. The book may be recommended as a wonderful read.

• George Thomas

  I finished this wistful, funny, wise book wishing it were longer. Some parts of Saxby Pridmore’s life are mentioned, and psychiatry is such a fascinating and varied field that he could surely write at least one good memoir solely on this career.

• Anne Henderson

  This memoir is in many ways a tribute to an Australia long past. The book mostly covers Pridmore’s early life as a boy, student and eventually graduate physician and psychiatrist. It is the story of the self-made in a country where perseverance and application can bring rewards. Along the way, Pridmore gives compelling insights to some of the oddities he encountered.

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