Couldn't stop listening. The author narrates, which is always a plus. ( )

Listened to the audio book. There is so much to unpack in this book; health-care inequalities, lack of mental health services, prison reform, etc... The human element was never lost in this non fiction book and I really felt all the characters. One of the best books I've read this year. ( )

Benjamin Gilmer, a recently qualified doctor, joins a practice in a poor, rural part of North Carolina to find out that not only does he by chance share his surname with the town’s beloved former doctor, Vince Gilmer, but that The Other Dr. Gilmer was serving a life sentence for the horrific murder of his elderly father.

At first distressed by the unexpected connection, Benjamin Gilmer eventually finds himself visiting his namesake in prison and realising that while there’s no doubt that Vince Gilmer committed the murder, his legal culpability is in doubt. Vince Gilmer has a fatal neurodegenerative disease which almost certainly played a role in his actions. There’s every reason to believe that if he had been diagnosed by the time of his trial, Vince Gilmer would have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a medical institution where he could get the medical care he needed to manage his last years. (There is no cure for his condition.) Benjamin Gilmer embarks on a campaign to gain a pardon and better medical care for Vince Gilmer.

This was something of a frustrating read. While Vince Gilmer’s story is a fascinating one—one which raises multiple questions about justice, legal accountability, the injustices of the carceral prison system, societal perspectives on mental illness and more—I do not think that Benjamin Gilmer is the best person to tell that story. Yes, he’s been involved in Vince Gilmer’s appeals process; yes, there is that hook that comes from the coincidence in their names.

But Benjamin Gilmer is, I think, more than a little self-involved. There’s nothing here that indicates that he would ever have thought very much at all about, say, the wrongs of mass incarceration if he hadn’t found out about the case of someone who shared a name and a job with him. I’m sure I too would be unsettled a bit by such a coincidence, but the grandiosity of his response—the anxiety that Vince Gilmer would be released from prison and attack him, the purchasing of security equipment, his talk of how he needed “healing” and so on—came across as weirdly centering him in a story that fundamentally is not about him. There’s also a lot of white saviourism/Nice White Centrist Dude-ism throughout. He wants the reader to know from the get-go that he spent time working at clinics in Gabon and Central America; is keen for us to know how much the Gabonese respected him and his vocation; tells us that he and his wife often put the suffix -ito on words because of the time they (two white people who’ve got very Anglo-sounding surnames) have spent in Latin America; and more than once makes passing reference to and/or describes women and/or BIPOC people in ways that made me side-eye.

I finished this book thinking that Gilmer is not the kind of person who thinks very far beyond the end of his nose.

And then, too, Benjamin Gilmer’s exploration of issues like legal accountability or the crisis in the provision of mental health services in the U.S. is cursory and shallow, and there are no new observations or insights to be gleaned here for anyone who’s read even a little on the subject before. Ultimately not a book that I feel has much to recommend it beyond calling attention to the case of Vince Gilmer—but honestly listening to the This American Life episode about it would be quicker to get through and just as informative. ( )

The Publisher Says: A rural physician learns that a former doctor at his clinic committed a shocking crime, leading him to uncover an undiagnosed mental health crisis in our broken prison system—a powerful true story expanding on one of the most popular This American Life episodes of all time.

When family physician Dr. Benjamin Gilmer began working at the Cane Creek clinic in rural North Carolina, he was following in the footsteps of a man with the same last name. His predecessor, Dr. Vince Gilmer, was beloved by his patients and community—right up until the shocking moment when he strangled his ailing father and then returned to the clinic for a regular day of work after the murder. He'd been in prison for nearly a decade by the time Benjamin arrived, but Vince's patients would still tell Benjamin they couldn't believe the other Dr. Gilmer was capable of such violence. The more Benjamin looked into Vince's case, the more he knew that something was wrong.

Vince knew, too. He complained from the time he was arrested of his SSRI brain, referring to withdrawal from his anti-depressant medication. When Benjamin visited Vince in prison, he met a man who was obviously fighting his own mind, constantly twitching and veering off into nonsensical tangents. Enlisting This American Life journalist Sarah Koenig, Benjamin resolved to get Vince the help he needed. But time and again, the pair would come up against a prison system that cared little about the mental health of its inmates—despite an estimated one third of them suffering from an untreated mental illness.

In The Other Dr. Gilmer, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer tells of how a caring man was overcome by a perfect storm of rare health conditions, leading to an unimaginable crime. Rather than get treatment, Vince Gilmer was sentenced to life in prison—a life made all the worse by his untrustworthy brain and prison and government officials who dismissed his situation. A large percentage of imprisoned Americans are suffering from mental illness when they commit their crimes and continue to suffer, untreated, in prison. In a country with the highest incarceration rates in the world, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer argues that some crimes need to be healed rather than punished.

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The carceral economy that makes corporations wealthy is evil.

That's my bias, right there; I make no apologies for it, and if your opinion is otherwise, this review will make you angry and upset, and feel (correctly) that you are being shamed and blamed for your absence of empathy and decency. Doubled if you claim to follow a religion.

A man with Huntington's disease, who was sexually abused by his parent, is serving a life sentence in prison for murdering that parent. Here is what the incarcerated man said to the author, when asked what he wanted this book to show the world when it was written:

Before I left the prison that day in 2018, I asked Vince to tell me the most important things he wanted this book to say. This is what he said:
Prison is torture.
Sexual abuse changes you forever.
We are all at the mercy of our brains.
Listening is healing.

Dr. Vince Gilmer will, it is almost certain, die in prison. There is no cure, or really any treatment, for Huntington's disease. His entire lifetime of service as a family physician in a poor area counted for nothing when weighed against the awful crime of strangling his abuser.

That's the nature of the system. For-profit prisons need prisoners; mental-health services cost a lot of money but make no one any profits. Guess which one we-the-people fund, generously? Mental health services can't guarantee good outcomes, some people can't be helped (Vince Gilmer, for example), so spending taxpayer money on the off-chance that this specific person who has committed a violent crime might be able to benefit? What a waste...there are corporations whose bottom lines could get fatter if he's jammed into jail.

As a result of untreated intergenerational trauma, exacerbated by a fatal degenerative neurological disease likely inherited from the parent who abused Vince Gilmer in childhood, he will die alone, in misery, in a corporate profit center. At the very least his life should end in a cold, uncaring corporate medical-profit center. (There is, at long last, some glimmer of hope for those crushed by medical debts; tiny, inadequate steps towards economic justice are better than the great race backwards occurring on so many fronts.)

If you've read The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row and enjoyed it, you're in the target demographic for the book. If you're thinking "oh pew! this is too hard, too much, too unhappy" then you *should* read it...because your empathy circuits need a bit of exercise. If you're sure people who commit murder belong in jail, what on Earth are you doing here in the first place?! ( )

The Other Dr. Gilmer was a complete surprise to me. I had not heard the story before even though it was featured on This American Life. I think that made it more enjoyable as I learned with Dr. Gilmer who wrote the book about the other Dr. Gilmer.

Benjamin Gilmer is a doctor who lives in Asheville, NC, and practices in a small town close enough to commute but far enough to be a very different world, conservative, rural, and poor. Right from the start, he hears about the doctor who helped found the clinic where he worked, a man also named Gilmer who inexplicably murdered his father and mutilated his corpse. The patients all spoke kindly of the former Dr. Gilmer who sounded like the man who would give you the proverbial shirt off his back.

That didn’t square with the crime he committed and as Dr. Benjamin Gilmer became more and more obsessed with the other Dr. Gilmer, even afraid of him, he decided to go see him in prison. He was surprised and quickly realized that things did not add up. The rest of the memoir is about his advocacy for the man who shares his name.

We live in a punitive society, one that locks up a greater share of its population than any other. We Prisons are grim and violent places where there is little focus on more than mass human storage. Once convicted, a person has few rights and fewer options to redress any injustices. It was heartening to read someone who was willing to make that connection with a convicted murderer and advocate on his behalf.

Benjamin Gilmer is a good story teller, keeping the narrative focused and fast-moving. The memoir is personable, as though he’s just talking to you. While he does write about t he many difficulties facing someone who committed the crime, so does not qualify for help from the various legal organizations like the Innocence Project, he does it in through conversation and investigation, so the book never becomes didactic. The Other Dr. Gilmer is an excellent book made even better by late developments just as it went to press.

I received an e-galley of The Other Dr. Gilmer from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Other Dr. Gilmer at Penguin Random House
Benjamin Gilmer at This American Life

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