Brooklyn Zoo

A compelling memoir of a psychotherapist’s clinical and personal education amid chaos and dysfunction that delivers an emotional impact to rival Susan Sheehan’s classic Is There No Place on Earth for Me? Seven years after her college graduation, Darcy Lockman abandoned a career in magazine journalism to become a psychologist. After four years in classrooms, she spent her final training year at the Kings County Hospital, an aging public institution on the outskirts of Brooklyn. When she started, little did she know that the hospital’s behavioral health department—the infamous G Building, where the Son of Sam serial killer David Berkowitz and the rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard once resided—was on the cusp of its darkest era yet, one that culminated in the death of a patient in a psychiatric emergency room described by the New York Post as a “Dickensian nightmare.” Brooklyn Zoo unfolds...