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Bio
Dale Zurawski has had a successful career as an engineer, technical salesperson, and water quality expert. She has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, a master’s in chemical engineering, and a second master’s in environmental management. She published several technical papers before devoting her writing career to her memoir and travel stories.
Dale was born in Nova Scotia, Canada. When she was three, her family moved to Alamogordo, New Mexico. She is interested in travel, gardening, and bike commuting. She is intrigued by cultural anthropology and writes short humorous stories about her worldwide travels. For the last twenty years, her home base has been Santa Barbara, California, where she lives with her husband of 40 years and her two dogs.
Reviewed by Christine Nguyen for Readers' Favorite
Bipolar: A Gift of Thorns is a deeply insightful memoir by Dale Zurawski about coping with bipolar disorder. Her husband, Geoff, is battling prostate cancer, which propels her to seek a psychiatrist. She is diagnosed as bipolar, which leads her on a path to understanding her painful past. Looking back on her childhood, she realizes that her father also struggled with bipolar disease. Dale inherited her father’s intelligence and bipolar disorder, resulting in alcohol abuse, drug addiction, and sex addiction throughout her college years. She excelled in science and school, but her wild lifestyle dismayed her family. Dale goes through years of trying to find the right balance of medication and therapy to cope.
Dale Zurawski writes with brutal honesty about her years of using sex, men, alcohol, and drugs to self-medicate. She gives readers glimpses into her turbulent life, leading a normal life with a high-profile job as a nuclear weapons scientist while jeopardizing her security clearance at night with risky behavior. The readers will learn more about living with bipolar disorder and maybe understand it more. Bipolar: A Gift of Thorns brings awareness of the condition and removes some of the shame and stigma our society associates with it. Kudos to Zurawski for her raw and often painful portrayal of her struggles with bipolar disease. This was a riveting and compelling read that held my attention throughout the entire book.
