Sam Weinstein was an immigrant from Roseieny, Kovna, Russia in the late 1880s. After a brief stay in New York, he accepted an assignment from a New York jobber to work as a peddler in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. He headed for those mountains, soon settled in Middlesboro, KY, and then opened a general merchandise store with his brother in the Magic City,
so-called because the mining town of Middlesboro had emerged, as if by magic, from a meteorite crater in the KY hills.

In 1901, Sam married Susie Goff, whose parents were Russian/Polish/Lithuanian immigrants living in Knoxville and running their own jobbing shop. Susie, Sam, and their six children stayed in Middlesboro until 1932. Sam was a prominent businessman, the de facto rabbi for the Middlesboro Jewish community, and a person interested and involved in local politics. Susie was a college graduate (rare for that era) whose attention was focused on the achievements of her children. Her life included fears and mysteries and enduring sorrow. Middlesboro was something of a wild-west town, full of saloons, clan murders, frequent shootouts, and Ku Klux Klan gatherings. The Weinstein family members saw it all.

The book is based on written and oral stories recorded by several of the family members, newspaper items from the local Kentucky papers during the years that the Weinsteins lived there, census records and other online archival resources, and books and articles about the region, the family members, and others in the town.

psychology but, instead, lapsed into a coma, remained "asleep" for seventeen years, and then suddenly returned to full consciousness and went on to live almost 100 years as a charismatic college professor with a rich personal life. In the decades after her life started up again, Day spent her winters teaching social science courses to the daughters of the wealthy and powerful in Washington, DC, and her summers teaching tennis and poetry and cooking bacon and eggs on the rocks at a seaside resort for Massachusetts mill and sweatshop workers. Her life was unique, her illness was long an enigma, and every word of this story is true.

"Ruth Levy Guyer has done the impossible. A knowledgeable and experienced medical scientist has produced a carefully researched case history that reads like a page-turner novel. The story of Marjorie Day is one any layperson will find fascinating but, at the same time, will challenge clinicians, neuroscientists, and bioethicists to deal with an inexplicably rosy outcome involving a patient who was pronounced a hopeless case. Day is the kind of patient who purveyors of contemporary wisdom would decide should be mercifully allowed to die. Yet, after an unprecedented period of seventeen years, she recovers to lead a wonderfully rich and productive life. Her story confronts those who advocate withdrawal of life support, but, just as importantly, those who would inflict prolonged and burdensome suffering on patients who would, with almost certain probability, not recover. The unresolved question is how each of us would want to be treated if we found ourself in Day’s predicament."

"Ruth Levy Guyer offers a meticulous and illuminating reconstruction of her protagonist "Daysey's" journey from college until the end of her long, fulfilled life, despite an absence that found her, her family, and those who cared for her coming face-to-face with the mysteries of diagnosis and prognosis. Guyer deepens those mysteries when she describes through Daysey's experiences what psychiatric care was like for those deemed "incurable." She writes with a passion for the person in all her trials and all her strengths, equally matched."

"Ruth Levy Guyer's A Life         Interrupted: The Long Night of Marjorie Day might also have been called "A Life Reconstructed." The book is a biography of Marjorie Day, a fascinating character who loses 17 years to a mysterious illness. Day re-enlists in her own life near age fifty, continuing her personal adventures until only two years short of a full century. The extraordinary details of her story are revealed through documents that the author discovered during painstaking detective work spanning thirty five years. The book blends one part Rip Van Winkle with two parts One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, finally yielding a portrait of an intrepid, indomitable and unforgettable woman. Her tale of personal triumph is an inspiration."

"The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska spoke in her Nobel acceptance speech in 1996 of valuing the phrase "I don't know" highly. "If Isaac Newton had never said to himself 'I don't know,' the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones, and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them down with gusto." Guyer's beautiful detective work in this tale of A Life         Interrupted is as fascinating as the strange life and missing years of her protagonist. Her investigation leads from location to location, from the memories of countless participants, from medical records, from the memoir of Majorie Cornelia Day, and from what she experiences as she makes this journey. Her "I don't know" carries her to archives and towns here and in England. The immediacy of her writing bring us fully and vividly along on the journey of discovery. What is so rare is Guyer's profound knowledge of science and medicine so that we have, in addition, a medical detective story told by an expert. And we end up with a remarkable life story of a unique figure who miraculously survives the primitive medical treatment she received during her seventeen-year hiatus from a normal life. This book calls to mind my own experience as a teenager working in a state mental hospital in the late 40's where patients were routinely lobotomized and given electric and insulin shock treatments, which greatly diminished memory. They were kept in primitive conditions. After years of large-scale institutionalization of mental patients, President Kennedy passed the Community Mental Health Act, which closed a number of these institutions with the aim of setting up small community mental health facilities, but many patients were unable to cope with life outside and ended up on the streets. It is nothing short of miraculous that Majorie Day survived the long uncertainty and serious medical effects of encephalitis lethargica, and that she recovered her full mental faculties and was able to lead an enormously productive life. Only through extreme persistence does Guyer uncover, layer by layer, the descent into mental and physical darkness that began on the southwestern coast of England during a study vacation with friends in 1926. And with the same persistence, brings us to the restoration of an exceptional life."

"A Life         Interrupted is a compelling exploration of the fragility, and the strength, of an individual's unique perceptions and intelligence, the moment-to-moment creation of tens of billions of cells in a thriving, wounded, and recovering, brain."

"Ruth Levy Guyer's A Life         Interrupted a beautifully written, moving story of a woman who entered the netherworld of institutionalization and emerged intact to tell the tale of what it was like behind those gray walls. I'm so glad Ruth Levy Guyer pursued this touching story, which otherwise may have been lost to the footnotes of medicine. Even more compelling than the protagonist's descent into illness is the way the author describes her re-emergence into the world—finding her way back by gravitating toward beauty, art, and nature. It's a reminder of the elemental joys that can sustain and guide us as we try to figure out why we're here and what we should do next. It's also a fascinating look at a rare disease, encephalitis lethargica, which makes me wonder if this is where the legend of zombies started."

—Tina Darragh, poet, author of Striking Resemblance