The classic children’s tale of a man who could walk with the animals, talk with the animals, grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals . . .

John Dolittle was not your average doctor. He was known as a quiet, capable physician who lived a simple life in a simple house with his sister. His true love was for animals. He even kept a menagerie of wildlife in his very home, which ended up scaring away his two-legged human clientele.

But after his parrot, Polynesia, teaches him the secret to speaking with animals, Dolittle finds a new calling as a veterinarian. He uses his gift to understand, help, and heal the furred and feathered of the world. As his fame spreads, he’s soon called upon to travel far from his small English village to the jungles of Africa, where an epidemic is threatening the entire monkey kingdom. It seems only Doctor Dolittle can save the day.

The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen’s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a “parallel universe” set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties.

Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.