The Kevin Show Audiobook By Mary Pilon cover art

The Kevin Show

An Olympic Athlete's Battle with Mental Illness

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The Kevin Show

By: Mary Pilon
Narrated by: Andrew Sellon
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About this listen

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Monopolists, the incredible story of Olympic sailor Kevin Hall and the psychiatric syndrome that makes him believe he stars in a television show of his life.

Meet Kevin Hall, brother, son, husband, father, and Olympic and America's Cup sailor. Kevin has an Ivy League degree and a winning smile, and throughout his adult life he has been engaged in an ongoing battle with a person that doesn't exist to anyone but him: the Director.

Kevin suffers from what doctors are beginning to call the "Truman Show" delusion, a form of psychosis named for the 1998 movie, where the main character is trapped as the star of a reality TV show. When the Director commands Kevin to do things, the results can lead to handcuffs, hospitalization, or both. Once he nearly drove a car into Boston Harbor. His girlfriend, now wife, was in the passenger seat.

In the tradition of Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, journalist Mary Pilon's The Kevin Show reveals the many-sided struggle by Kevin, his family, and the medical profession to understand and treat a psychiatric disorder whose euphoric highs and creative ties to pop culture have become inextricable from Kevin's experience of himself. Interweaving his perspective, journals, and sketches with police reports, medical records, and interviews with those who were present at key moments in his life, The Kevin Show is a bracing, suspenseful, and eye-opening view of the role that mental health plays in a seemingly ordinary life.

©2018 Mary Pilon (P)2018 Recorded Books
Mental Health Psychology Sports Water Sports Marriage Celebrity Sailing
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overall well reported and comprehensive

Author's decision to chronologically catalog what seems like nearly every one of Kevin's mental breakdowns with diaristic fidelity starts to summon up tedium after a while. Readers looking just for a comprehensive biographical rendering of Kevin's mental illness will be satisfied. Those wanting a larger philosophical or neuropsychological view of the subject matter will find themselves tested in the middle and middling parts, though the book does redeem itself towards the end. Book does do a terrific job of rendering the culture and world of competitive sailing, and show how the small-minded and ridiculous bureaucracies of the corruptible IACC made Kevin's competition much more stressful than was needed, for what was therapeutically necessary testosterone injections.

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