"1974 was a bad year to go crazy," Virginia Holman writes in this astonishing, beautiful, and painfully funny memoir of life with her schizophrenic mother in a disintegrating decade. In May 1974, one year after Patty Hearst and her captors robbed Hibernia National Bank, a second kidnapping took place, far from the glare of the headlines. Virginia Holman's mother, in the thrall of her first psychotic episode, believed she'd been inducted into a secret army. On command of the voices in her head, she spirited her two daughters to the family cottage on the Virginia Peninsula, painted the windows black, and set up the house as a field hospital. They remained there for four years, waiting for a war that never came. At first, it was easy to explain away her mother's symptoms in the context of the changing times -- her mother was viewed as "finding herself" in the spirit of the decade. When challenged about her delusion of the secret war, she invoked the name of Martha Mitchell. When she exhibited florid psychosis, her aunt, influenced by Hollywood's smash hit movie The Exorcist, seriously suggested that an exorcism might be in order. Even after she was hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia in the early 1980s, Holman's mother retained just enough lucidity to appease caseworkers in a system seemingly more concerned with protecting a patient's rights than with halting the progress of a woman's desperately dangerous illness. Rescuing Patty Hearst is an unflinching account of the dark days during which Holman's family was held hostage by her mother's delusions and the country was beset by the folly of the Watergate era. It is a startling memoir of a daughter's harrowing sojourn in the prison of her mother's mind. And, finally, it lingers as a moving portrait of a young woman defined by her mother's illness -- until at last she rekindles a family love that had lost its way. "Nineteen seventy-four was a bad time to go crazy," reads the gripping first line in this thoroughly unique memoir by Virginia Holman, a frequent contributor to magazines such as Redbook and Self . But despite that sentence and the suggestion of the title (Patty Hearst is a metaphor here, not a character), this work of "creative nonfiction" is extremely personal rather than generational. As with The Liar's Club by Mary Karr (whose Spartan but poetic prose Holman sometimes recalls), the strength of Rescuing Patty Hearst is that it finds universality in a very specific situation and story. One year after the famous heiress's celebrated kidnapping, in the midst of Watergate and the other turbulent events of America's most misunderstood era, the author's mother retreated with her two daughters to a rustic cabin in rural Virginia, thoroughly convinced that the voices in her head were directing her to establish a field hospital in preparation for a cataclysmic war that never came. The book proceeds to chart Holman's mother's extended and heartbreakingly sad battle with schizophrenia, and its impact on her seemingly typical middle-class American family. The author's response progresses from detached bemusement, to horror and revulsion, and to a warm understanding and acceptance without ever becoming callous, maudlin, or romantic. Her recollections make for a consistently riveting story, while leaving the reader with a deep and profound understanding of the true tragedies and frustrating complexities of severe mental illness. --Jim DeRogatis Holman relates life with a schizophrenic mother who abducted her and then kept her locked away in a cabin with blacked-out windows. The publicist loves this one. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. In this searing memoir of her mother's psychotic unraveling and her family's struggle to survive it, Holman draws parallels between the uncertainty and craziness of the times and the dislocation within her own family. Holman switches between the early 1970s when her mother's decline began and the year 2000, trying to reconcile her past and her present, to make sense of her mother's breakdown and her personal fear that she may have inherited her mother's mental illness. Holman was nine years old when she and her baby sister were whisked away by their mother to the family's drafty summer cottage on a deluded secret mission. Holman's mother heard voices telling her to prepare for a secret war by setting up a field hospital. Barricaded in the cottage, with the windows painted black, Holman struggles over the next three years with adolescent angst and her own unwillingness to believe that her mother is suffering a breakdown. This is a frightening look at the impact of mental instability upon family members and their struggle to acknowledge the illness in order to can get help. Vanessa Bush Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Haven Kimmel author of A Girl Named Zippy and The Solace of Leaving Early Rescuing Patty Hearst is filled with potent images of family life, gho