I Thought I Could Fly: Portraits of Anguish, Compulsion, and Despair

Bellevue Literary Press

$22
Trade paper
ISBN: 978-934137-09-3
144 pages
Nonfiction

A tree’s bare limbs against a grey sky, a young woman’s vintage slip, the view beneath
a bridge’s span. Charlee Brodsky’s stark black and white photographs combine with a
concise collection of moving personal narratives to form an eloquent ensemble of tragedy
and hope in the struggle to cope with mental illness.

"Evocative images, eloquent testimony--a frank and often inspiring exploration of the
experience of mental illness."
--Peter D. Kramer, author of Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind and Listening to Prozac

Charlee Brodsky is a documentary photographer and a professor of photography at
Carnegie Mellon University.

I Thought I Could Fly: Portraits of Anguish, Compulsion and Despair

Bellevue Literary Press
blpress.org/
$22
Trade paper
ISBN: 978-934137-09-3
144 pages
Nonfiction


"Evocative images, eloquent testimony--a frank and often inspiring exploration of the experience of mental illness."

--Peter D. Kramer, author of Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind and Listening to Prozac

A tree's bare limbs against a grey sky, a young woman's vintage slip, the view beneath a bridge's span. Charlee Brodsky's stark black and white photographs combine with a concise collection of moving personal narratives to form an eloquent ensemble of tragedy and hope in the struggle to cope with mental illness.

Charlee Brodsky is a documentary photographer and a professor of photography at Carnegie Mellon University.

This trailer introduces the interactive quicktime piece available at my site.

This clip was created from two separate downloads from archive.org- the woman is from a westinghouse commercial and the boy from a piece critical of the emerging 50's culture involving TV, TV Dinners and emerging couch potato inactivity.

On March 17, 1928, Nancy Anne Miller married Tukoji Rao, former Maharajah of Indore. The wedding of a well-educated, cultivated young American woman to an Indian potentate of Hindu background who had been involved in two former marriages and several political scrapes making neccessary his retirement has caused much public discussion. There was a great deal of free-hand predicting. "It couldn't last. The differences in religions, in cultural background, of life, were too great." "East was east, and west was and all that". The words flowed on..

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir
Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang
In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America, but their history remains largely unknown. Driven to share her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, Kao Kalia Yang’s memoir is a tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together.
Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family’s captivity in Laos, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp.
When she was six years old, Yang’s family immigrated to America. She evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language, and also gives voice to the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community.

Everybody is Somebody. I don't think you can take any of these people for granted in spite of their status as "dead and gone."