Reviews - Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

897 reviews for:

Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

Antonia Hylton

4.35 AVERAGE

vesperops's review

4.0

challenging dark emotional informative medium-paced

ohyeahdog's review

5.0

This is a must read up there with The New Jim Crow and The Warmth of Other Suns. It’s beautifully researched and written.

hknoll's review

4.0

emotional informative medium-paced

zoereck's review

3.25

dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

hellahellahomo's review against another edition

DID NOT FINISH: 20%

Put it down and really struggled to pick it back up. It’s good, but too heavy for me right now.

I stopped reading at page 75 not because the subject matter wasn’t important or harrowing. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of this story before, and its historical significance is undeniable. However, the writing style made it difficult to stay engaged. It felt like a collection of college-level essays awkwardly stitched together for a larger project, with poor transitions and a lack of cohesion. The frequent shifts between historical records and first-person antecedents, combined with abrupt changes in tense, created a jarring experience that pulled me out of the narrative. While the content is vital, the execution fell short of doing justice to the weight of the topic.

keirahelena_'s review against another edition

4.5

challenging dark informative slow-paced

Content Warnings

lyon_3rd's review

dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

This is a great book and a devastating book. Would recommend for anyone connected to or living in the Annapolis area.
I grew up a few miles from the Crownsville Hospital. I had no idea about the majority of information in this book. Only as an adult have I started to understand the history of this place. I really wish that I'd been taught more about this, or at least about the racial undertones of the rhetoric around Crownsville, before I'd moved away. We spent time on Maryland history and local history, but recent (the hospital was still running in the 1990s) history like this never came up.

Also, I've drive on Aris T. Allen Boulevard more times than I can count, and I had no idea that he was a Black doctor and senator in the area who only died in 1991. Now that's on me, but a reminder to all of us- those named streets mean something!!