Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
Robert Kolker
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. "Reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness." —Oprah Winfrey A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965.
Award History
0 wins · 2 total
| Award | Year | Result | Category / Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in NonfictionMajor | 2021 | Longlist | Official source |
| PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction | 2021 | Finalist | Source URL pending |
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies
This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.
01 Central figures
None extracted with sufficient confidence.
These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.
- Don Galvin60%
- Mimi Galvin60%
- Oprah Winfrey40%
02 Central places
None extracted with sufficient confidence.
These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.
- Colorado55%
03 Suggested argument
No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.
04 Reading orientation
25 / 100 academicSerious trade
An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.
Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 55%.