A Fine line between genius and madness
By DJ M on April 29th, 2006
In Brian Wilson/B. Boys
WASHINGTON POST “That's the impulse that drove Jeffrey A. Kottler, chair of the Department of Counseling at California State University, Fullerton, to take up the study of the human mind. ‘It wasn't until I became a psychologist and started listening to everyone else's troubles,’ he writes in Divine Madness, ‘that I learned I wasn't nearly as weird as I had ever imagined.’ Of his profiles of major artists, entertainers and writers of the 20th century, the most gripping -- those of Charles Mingus, Lenny Bruce, Vaslav Nijinsky and Brian Wilson -- succeed not because they break any new historical ground but because they get to the essence of madness, in all its horror and pathos.”