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"I was born because a man came to kill my father."
William Friedrich, an ambitious professor of psychology at Yale in the early 1950s, has stumbled upon a drug that promises happiness -- and that can make him a famous man. His is a humanitarian effort; an
attempt to relieve Americans of suffering, and the early results are so
promising that Friedrich stakes his future on it. But when his
experiment goes awry and a research subject, a brilliant and troubled
Yale student, commits murder, the consequences will haunt him and his
family forever.
Pharmakon, which in Greek
means both "poison" and "cure," is an epic invocation of the quest for
bliss, for love, for family and prosperity, and all of the betrayals
that follow. Through the eyes of the youngest son, Zach, we follow the
Friedrichs from the well-ordered suburban life of postwar America
through the chaos and freedom of the counterculture into the
drug-fueled, media-crazed eighties and beyond. In William Friedrich,
Wittenborn has defined the archetypal American patriarch: a miracle
worker and source of strength to everyone except those he loves the
most. Honest, insightful, and ruefully funny, Pharmakon
captures formative moments of the twentieth century and the telling
traits of an American family. It is also a layered, thoughtful search
behind the veil of psychopharmacology as we know it today -- a tale not
only of the consequences of research, but the complex personalities,
appetites, and struggles that created it.
pub date: 2008-07-08 | paperback | 9780670019427 |
