Talking to Angels CL

The ""angels"" of the title are the fearsome guards in a psychiatric hospital where, at 19, Perkins was confined for a year in 1968. Here, nearly three decades later, he is able to recreate that surreal experience in a miraculous blend of the objective and sensate realities. No less stunning are his accounts of frightening and exhilarating months spent alone on the Arctic tundra, where he lived in a meat locker, and of the anguishing death of his young wife after three months of marriage. But although these three powerful tales might otherwise be depressing, they are rescued by Perkins's sense of the absurd and by a voice, pure and beautiful, that speaks compellingly of fear and bravery, of an intimacy with nature and of love and loss. Perkins, a documentary filmmaker and author (Into the Great Solitude), has produced a small classic on journeys into the human condition. (May)