Making God Laugh

"On a bright June day in the late 1980s, I found myself strapped into an electric chair." So begins R.C. Goodwin's captivating memoir, which encompasses his life from growing up in the Midwest during the 1950s to his ivy-league foray at Yale, majoring in history, and on to studying medicine in Dublin. Returning to the U.S., he undertook a psychiatric career despite initial misgivings about the specialty. Practicing psychiatry in the suburbs, prisons, and at a major university, he embarked upon a journey in which his patients included corporate executives and serial killers, teenagers and centenarians, alcoholics and drug addicts, and those addicted to online pornography. We learn something of the side trips in this journey-the joy, pain, humor, frustration, angst, and unending surprises along the way-and how all this affected his personal life as he dealt with the same universal issues his patients try to deal with.