Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

This account of growing up with a mentally ill mother “belongs on a shelf of classic memoirs, alongside The Liars’ Club and Angela’s Ashes ” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times ). As an NPR correspondent, Jacki Lyden visited some dangerous war zones—but her childhood was a war zone of a different kind.   Lyden’s mother suffered from what is now called bipolar disorder or manic depression. But in a small Wisconsin town in the sixties and seventies she was simply “crazy.” In her delusions,