dinamurray73 's review for:

Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton

4.0

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This book was a tough one to read -- anyone who thinks America is not a racist country should read this. The things that happened at this place within my lifetime are shocking. The narrative wanders a bit -- the author tries to weave some of her personal family history into the book and the process of researching the book, and I was more interested in the history of the actual asylum. I think part of the reason why she may have done this is the fact that so many of the records of the hospital were either destroyed or never kept to begin with -- the state did not feel like the patients in this institution were worth the time to even bother with.