Customer Reviews

Danvers State: Memoirs Of A Nurse In The Asylum

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Having read as extensively as possible about Danvers State and also having the luxury of hearing first-hand accounts from locals who worked there, I expected an informative book full of interesting tales, accurate descriptions of patients' daily lives, perhaps even photos from Szot's time spent there. This book reads like what it is: some random memories of an aging woman who wants to recount her past. This book is VERY poorly written, mind-numbingly repetitive and contains but a few very short anecdotes of various patient behaviors. Szot describes many of her duties as aide and nurse, (often several times throughout as though the book never met the eyes of another reader let alone an editor before its publication!)but it also annoyingly rambles on about Szot's family life, from her childhood to her pregnancies and beyond. I continuoualy found myself saying, "Get on with it!" or "Yes, you've mentioned that three times already!" From beginning to end I waited and waited to get to the "good part." Sadly, there wasn't one. I truly understand the desire of the elderly to share the stories of their lives, but if you're looking for an interesting recount of the life and times of Danvers State and its patients, look elsewhere!

To say this book was boring or poorly written would be understatements! The statement on the back of the book promises "an insider's view of what really went on at the state run insane asylum." What you actually get is a rambling and repetitive story of Mrs. Szot's childhood, marriage, family life and problems dealing with her own mother's death. There is very little about the actual "view of what really went on." Mrs. Szot explains that she even took her children to work with her, not a thing one would think to be appropriate if she believed there was "harsh treatment of mental illness" as the cover of the book reported she would "bring to light." A lot of her stories contradict each other, for example she makes a point of repeating early in the book that RNs did not mingle with aides, only to tell the story, more than once, of how when a nurse came in drunk they covered for her. I have been a psychiatric nurse for 17 years and was looking forward to learning more about the history of mental health and treatment of patients, well this was not the place for that. It is a shame no one edited or gave input to these ramblings. Don't waste your money or time.

When it comes to finding any tid-bit of information on Danvers State Hospital, I am willing to read just about anything. I saw Session 9 a couple of years ago and that started my now two year obsession with DSH. Since then I have collected numerous photos, and even travelled out there to see the place for myself.
When I found this book, I didn't know what to expect. The cover was a little misleading. It's dark, foreboding, and hints at dark and strange tales from one of the most famous State Hospitals in the U.S. However, Angelina only hints at a few of her scarier experiences there and spoke a lot of the love and care that went on. She truly did care for her charges and it shows.
I had to use my imagination somewhat to try to figure out what the hospital looked like during her time there. She is no professional author and the use of descriptive terms is not her thing. I don't fault her for that, but maybe the person who helped her write it could have fleshed it out (accurately of course)for those who weren't there.
She also did focus perhaps too much on her family life. It was nice to know a bit about where she comes from but, for my money, I think I learned more than I cared to. I also realize that she didn't tell everything she could have. Im sure that there are A LOT of stories of goings on at DSH that will never leave her (whether for personal or legal reasons).
Overall, it was a good but short read. I read this book in one sitting. Perhaps Mrs. Szot did not write this book to fuel the imagination of the morbid population; maybe she wrote this to bring Danvers State Hospital into a new light...one that shows that although there was a much darker side of the hospital, there WAS caring and hope that also went on there as well.

Although I am well aware the author of this book was NOT an author by trade, this book seemed to be a bit on the "rough" side. By this, I mean, I found many passages repeated, stories as well,and found it not to be very enlightening at all. This author spent more time talking about herself, and her family etc than she did about Danvers. It seemed that too many references to her parents and family were uneccessary. I don't know WHO edited this book, but I sure hope they weren't paid for it.

On the whole, this woman obviously felt the need to tell her story, but I found her story typical and stale. She tells of out-of-control patients...NO KIDDING. It's "DANVERS". Perhaps my expectations were a bit high, who knows...I guess she thought it would be a good read. SO did I, but now wish I had saved my money. I'm reselling it on Ebay.

This book is not only at about a "young adult" level, the writing is so bad that it's painful. Worst of all, it's BORING! Absolutely no insight, bizarre stories, or even particularly in-depth commentary on the asylum itself. I'll sum it up for you--author's life was hard. Author gets a job at the mental hospital even though it's kind of weird. Being a nurse's aide was hard. The author becomes a nurse. Some of the staff aren't very nice to the patients. Some of the patients are incontinent. All in all, it's an okay job but the author finally quits because some of the staff aren't very nice to the patients. The end. Skip this one.

I picked this book up a short while ago and while it was a quick read, it gave me a great insight of what went on within the Danvers State Hospital. This book is the personal memoir of Angelina Szot, a retired nurse who has spent the greater part of her nursing career as a nurse in a mental institution.

This book contained the various stories she has accumulated over her years of work at Danvers State Hospital. It includes her interactions between the patients and staff, the state of the hospital, and the interactions between the administration and staff just to name a few stories.

The negative thing that could be said about the book was that it did not go as in depth as I would have liked it to.

Yet, we must remember that this book is a memoir of a nurse who had spent the greater part of her life working with the mentally ill. Each story is amusing, scary, and downright interesting to read.

If you are looking for a quick book of life in a state hospital I wouldn't pass this up!

Underlying the wandering musings of an aged working class woman who seemed more interested in the time she and her husband got their first television set (she mentions that red-letter-day occasion several times)is an initial coldness and not a little cruelty. She pays lips service to the plight of the patients, but every other epithet applied to them is "loony" "crazy" "nuts" "insane". She even calls Danvers "the nut house", and "the lunatic asylum" and one can almost hear her caustic exchanges with the desperate patients in her charge: "There'll be three dead bodies here, because I'll beat the sh-- out of you if I have to." The viciously morbid, sadistic jokes she played on student nurses and interns are horrible. It's more than a lack of education which makes her background that of low breeding and peasant ignorance. Would you honestly have wanted this woman to have been your nurse, whether in a psychiatric hospital or a regular one? No wonder mental hospitals in those days only attracted the lowest common denominator, and places such as Byberry, Miledgeville, and Cleveland's notorious "Turney Tech", with their penury wages and malevolent surroundings drew the ruthless, the brutal, and the low-down for state hospital employ - - and the hideous abuse of the patients by attendants and many nurses and doctors was the terrible result. Making the care of the mentally ill a family industry for the Szots must have meant an endurance of hard-boiled, indifferent caretakers for the Danvers patients, even if they didn't outright mistreat their charges. Attitude was enough.

Certainly, Mrs. Szot's childhood was to be pitied -- it didn't mold a very sympathetic personage, from the miserly, autocratic father who drove herr frail mother to her death with repeated childbearing and backbreaking labor; immediately remarried months after her demise, and sent his daughter out while still in her early teens to work in the mills. That would harden anybody, and not to be exposed to education and culture turned out this despicably uncaring creature as a result.

That said, the book is shallow and undescriptive. As I am researching the history of mistreatment in early-mid 20th-century mental hospitals for a novel I'm writing, I'm keeping it as proof of "what kind of people" usually worked at such institutions.

I usually do not write online reviews of books, but I feel very strongly about this one... This is one of the most poorly written and repetitive books I have ever read. I am very interested in reading anything I can about Danvers State, and I was hoping this book would contain specific stories and insights about the day to day life at Danvers. Unfortunately, this book was written more like unorganized ramblings about a person's life. It contained more information about the author's personal life and family than it did about Danvers State, and often the same information was repeated over and over throughout the book. If you are interested in reading random memories about the author's life (literally from birth to when she quit working at Danvers), including about her childhood, her husband, kids, where they lived, etc, then this is the book for you. If you are interested in learning anything new about Danvers State, skip it. There is nothing even remotely interesting revealed in this book. To describe this book as being "about Danvers State" is completely inaccurate.

Even after reading the dismal reviews for Danvers State, I still decided to give the book a chance. I wholeheartedly regret that decision. Reviews said that the book was poorly written, and they are correct. Previous readers claim that there was a lot or repetition, and there is. I also noticed that the author wasted a lot of print reliving family stories that had no bearing on the book itself. The reading level of the book was so low that I finished it in a few hours. This could have been a great book, but its shortcomings reduce it to something almost unreadable.

I was disappointed with this book. It is extremely short, since it is double-spaced. Very quickly read it. I expected some stories of patients but stories were about one paragraph without much information. Information was repeated several times. I appreciate the story about her upbringing and family, but wanted more information on the patients. Book is way too brief.