El-Hai, Jack

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El-Hai, Jack

PERSONAL:

Born in Los Angeles, CA; married; children: two daughters.Education: Graduated from Carleton College.

ADDRESSES:

Home—MN. Agent—Laura Langlie, 239 Carroll St., Brooklyn, NY 11231. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, journalist, and educator. Freelance writer for over twenty years; Loft Literary Center, Minneapolis, MN, teacher. Also gives public lectures and workshops on writing.

MEMBER:

American Society of Journalists and Authors (president).

AWARDS, HONORS: June Roth Memorial Award, 2002, for medical journalism; grants from the Center for Arts Criticism; McKnight Foundation fellow; Jerome Foundation fellow; Loft Creative Nonfiction Award; Annual Book Award, Medical Journalists' Association of the United Kingdom, and Minnesota Book Award, Minnesota Humanities Commission, both 2006.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Minnesota Collects, photography by Eric Mortenson, Minnesota Historical Society Press (St. Paul, MN), 1992.

Celebrating Tradition, Building the Future: Seventy-five Years of Land o'Lakes, Land o'Lakes, Inc. (Minneapolis, MN), 1996.

Memories of a Lifetime: Jostens, 1897-1997, Jostens (Minneapolis, MN), 1998.

Clean and Friendly for More Than 25 Years: The Super 8 Story, Greenwich (Lyme, CT), 1999.

Lost Minnesota: Stories of Vanished Places, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2000.

The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness, J. Wiley (Hoboken, NJ), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, includingAtlantic Monthly, American Heritage, American Archaeology, theWashington Post, and History Channel magazines.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jack El-Hai is a freelance writer who specializes in history-based journalism. His earlier books, such as Celebrating Tradition, Building the Future: Seventy-five Years of Land o'Lakes, Clean and Friendly for More Than 25 Years: The Super 8 Story, and Lost Minnesota: Stories of Vanished Places, focus on corporate and organizational history. However, in 2005 El-Hai published his first biography, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness.

The Lobotomist details the life of Dr. Walter Freeman, an American neurologist who performed roughly 3,400 lobotomies between 1936 and 1967. The surgery was first given to patients with mental illnesses deemed otherwise incurable, and included cutting the nerve fibers of the brain's frontal lobes. Freeman was an enthusiastic advocate of the procedure, using it to treat everything from depression to schizophrenia. Freeman later developed the "trans-orbital" lobotomy, a more cost-effective form of the operation performed by administering an electric shock as an anesthetic, subsequently inserting an ice pick between the eyeball and eyelid, and making a cut in the front of the brain. Approximately one-third of Freeman's patients showed improvement. Eventually, the lobotomy lost popularity after the rise of psychoanalysis and the development of pharmaceuticals such as antidepressants and anti-psychotics. In The Lobotomist, El-Hai uses Freeman's books, articles, letters, journals, and interviews to detail the doctor's life and place in twentieth-century psychiatry.

Critical response to The Lobotomist was mostly positive. A SciTech Book News contributor felt that aside from serving as a biography of Freeman, the book also works as "a history of the evolution of psychiatric medicine." Although Brenda Maddox, writing in the New Statesman, pointed out that "the reader might wish for a few more hard statistics and international comparisons," she maintained that the book is "an important and disturbing contribution to the history of psychiatry." Additionally, Library Journal reviewer A.J. Wright remarked that El-Hai "deftly chronicles the rise and fall of Freeman and the procedure he championed," while Dylan Evans, reviewing the book in the Guardian, acknowledged: "If you want to know what kind of man takes such a huge gamble with other people's brains, Jack El-Hai's new biography of Freeman offers an answer." Booklist critic Donna Chavez concluded that "El-Hai tackles the controversial procedure and its inventor … with the dispassionate reserve of a trained journalist."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 2005, Donna Chavez, review of The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness, p. 1046.

Clinical Psychiatry News, March, 2005, Rodrigo A. Munoz, review of The Lobotomist, p. 56.

Guardian (London, England), June 11, 2005, Dylan Evans, review of The Lobotomist.

Library Journal, January 1, 2005, A.J. Wright, review of The Lobotomist, p. 139.

New Statesman, June 13, 2005, Brenda Maddox, review of The Lobotomist, p. 52.

SciTech Book News, December, 2005, review of The Lobotomist.