Carried Away is a unique childhood memoir that serves not only as an historical testament to life in post World War Two Iceland, but also as an engaging query into the very nature of mental illness. As such, this book can appeal to a wide audience that includes children as well as adults, older children, ever feeling themselves to be outsiders, can readily identify with the life of this introspective and adventuresome boy. Scholars and students of a number of disciplines can also, of course, benefit from this ethnography of an insane asylum. As a first-person account from someone who is neither an alien observer nor a patient, this narrative deserves study in the fields of historical psychology, psychiatry, and cultural anthropology. Additionally, Carried Away can be important to the field of cultural criticism, in which critics like Foucault, in his Madness and Civilization, question the pathologizing of harmless (if puzzling) human behavior.
