“Lithium Jesus: A Memoir of Mania” – Public Radio Tulsa

On this edition of ST, a rather “wild ride” of a conversation with Charles Monroe-Kane, a producer and host for the long-running Wisconsin Public Radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge (which is heard locally on Public Radio 89.5 on Sunday mornings). Monroe-Kane has a new book out — an autobiography that candidly reports on how he grew up with auditory hallucinations and bipolar disorder. It’s a detailed yet breathless account that takes the reader from rural Ohio, to the Philippines, to Haiti, to Indiana, to San Francisco, to Alaska, to NYC, to Prague, and so forth. Per a critic writing for Kirkus Reviews: “A young man grapples with bipolar ‘voices’ via religion, hedonism, activism, and Lithium. In his debut, Monroe-Kane, a Peabody Award-winning public radio producer, brings a fresh perspective to familiar memoir territory…. [This is a] compelling account of wrestling with inner turmoil against gritty, dramatic international settings.”  When Monroe-Kane was here in Tulsa recently to do a couple of events, he joined us at our studios for a discussion of his memoir.

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