Christopher Lane's SHYNESS Reviewed in the Telegraph

Who needs Seroxat? A better drug's at hand
By Harry Mount
The Telegraph.co.uk, Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 21/12/2007

The Christmas party season is upon us and so is the hell of being at a Christmas party and knowing nobody.

I've already been to a couple this year where I've honed my techniques for looking as if I'm perfectly happy on my own. First, I take several slow circuits round the room, making a determined beeline towards a non-existent friend. Then I stand next to a wall, convincing myself that I'm happier observing than being part of the crowd - what a red-faced lot, laughing at nothing.

None of this is very sophisticated, but it's better than what I used to do until I was 17, which was head for the exit, miserable and cripplingly shy.
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Nowadays, I'd be diagnosed with social phobia, and be prescribed Seroxat, which boosts your serotonin, the naturally occurring happiness-enhancer in the brain. All this is in Shyness: How Normal Behaviour became a Sickness, a new book by Christopher Lane, a Chicago professor.

In the past decade, the NHS has spent £1.5 billion on drugs for shyness - or "social anxiety" and "avoidant personality disorder" (I still suffer from that one). There are now apparently six million sufferers in Britain.

Thank God I've got over my shyness since Seroxat took off. The best shyness cure is a long, brutal slog - learning how to talk to other people and not to mind too much being on your own.

The consolation is that former shyness sufferers spend so long learning how to fill dreaded silences that they tend to become good conversationalists in the end.

It's easy to spot the difference between the eager-to-please, once-shy person and the I-know-I'm-pleasing-you type who's never been shy. The once-shy ask questions and frantically tailor their conversation to the other person's character; the always confident bang on regardless. Stephen Fry was clearly shy once; Tony Benn, never.

Using drugs as a buffer to avoid learning these things is disastrous. You remain in a perpetual zombie state of zonked-out shyness, never forced to learn the benefits of how to talk to new people.

In any case, it's several thousand years since humans developed an excellent drug to deal with the inevitable awkwardness of being trapped in a strange room between the hours of 6.30 and 8.30pm with people you don't know or like.

You don't need prescriptions, you choose the dose, and hosts provide the drug in various forms and strengths on prominent display. It's called a drink.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Christopher Lane's SHYNESS Reviewed in Spiked Review of Books

Humanity, thou art sick
With shyness diagnosed as ‘social phobia’, and dissent as Oppositional Defiant Disorder, more and more emotions are being psychologised. Or perhaps I’m just suffering from Book Review Hyperactivity Dementia?
by Helene Guldberg, spiked review of books

‘In my mother’s generation, shy people were seen as introverted and perhaps a bit awkward, but never mentally ill.’


So writes the Chicago-based research professor, Christopher Lane, in his fascinating new book Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness. ‘Adults admired their bashfulness, associated it with bookishness, reserve, and a yen for solitude. But shyness isn’t just shyness any more. It is a disease. It has a variety of over-wrought names, including “social anxiety” and “avoidant personality disorder”, afflictions said to trouble millions’, Lane continues.

Lane has taken shyness as a test case to show how society is being overdiagnosed and overmedicated. He has charted - in intricate detail - the route by which the psychiatric profession came to give credence to the labelling of everyday emotions as ‘disorders’, a situation that has resulted in more and more people being deemed to be mentally ill.

Some claim that up to 50 per cent of the population will suffer from mental illness some time in their lives. A 2001 report titled Mental Health: New Understanding, New Hope, published by the World Health Organisation (WHO), claims that today between 10 and 20 per cent of young people suffer from mental health or behavioural disorders. Hans Troedsson, WHO director for child and adolescent health, has expressed grave concern about the mental health status of the world’s young. ‘It is a time-bomb that is ticking and without the right action now millions of our children growing up will feel the effects’, he warned. In the WHO report, it is claimed that mental disorders can be diagnosed ‘as reliably and accurately as most of the common physical disorders’.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Watch Lou Ureneck, Author of Backcast on Boston's WGBH

To view Emily Rooney's interview with Lou Ureneck, author of Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska please click here.

Marlene Zuk, author of RIDDLED WITH LIFE Opinion piece in LA Times

So a fruit fly goes to a bar ...
Pop a pill and be straight or gay? It's a lot more exciting, and complicated, than that.
By Marlene Zuk
LA Times, December 19, 2007


The news last week that scientists induced homosexual courtship in male fruit flies by changing levels of a neuro chemical was greeted with predictable headlines: "Scientists make fruit flies gay, then straight again." On science blogs, discussion raged about whether this meant that a drug altering sexual orientation would, or should, be developed by the demon Big Pharma. Others trotted out arguments about whether homosexuality was learned or genetic, and about its existence elsewhere in the animal kingdom, and then meandered into why places with large contingents of gays -- such as San Francisco and Boulder, Colo. -- are usually nice places to live.

As someone who studies animal behavior for a living, I've been at least as interested as anyone else in the emerging discoveries that many animals exhibit homosexual behavior. And, as it happens, I've become something of a go-to person on gay penguins (a subject for another day). But people seem to be missing the real reason the discovery is important, which has little or nothing to do with sexual orientation.


For the rest of the piece, click here.

Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES Gets a Starred Review in Kirkus

*HIGH CRIMES
The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed
Kodas, Michael

Kirkus, DECEMBER 15, 2007

Publisher:Hyperion
Pages: 368
Price (hardback): $24.95
Publication Date: 2/5/2008 0:00:00
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0273-3
ISBN (hardback): 978-1-4013-0273-3
Category: NONFICTION

A *star is assigned to books of unusual merit, determined by the editors of Kirkus Reviews

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kodas finds avarice, theft and worse on the slopes of Mount Everest during a troubled 2004 expedition.

On assignment for the Hartford Courant, Kodas went with his wife and six others on an Everest expedition that quickly dissolved into acrimony. Problems surfaced with their erratic guide, George Dijmarescu, and other team members even before they left the United States. Eventually, the dissension resulted in charges of theft and physical threats. Kodas also encountered evidence that some team members ignored dying climbers near Everest's peak. The author's cautionary tale paints a grim picture of Everest mountaineering today. Poorly trained climbers, eager for the status of an Everest summit, routinely pay exorbitant fees to guides who inflate their resumes to make a quick buck, then often abandon their clients when they falter in the high-altitude "Death Zone." Increasingly, these wealthy novices are taxing the manpower and resources of able climbers and guides, who are reluctant to leave their own well-paying ascents to rescue them. Meanwhile, Kodas finds the slopes of Everest rampant with crime, from the disappearance of vital equipment to drug use and prostitution. He points to one outfitter who routinely sold substandard oxygen tanks, threatening the lives of climbers who used them. Even steroids have apparently found their way to Everest, as climbers look for that extra boost to get them to the top.

A clear-eyed, riveting narrative.


For Kirkus Reviews, click here.

David Blight's A SLAVE NO MORE in Charlotte Observer

NONFICTION
A new birth of freedom
Author presents lives of 2 escaped slaves as symbols of `glorious' liberation
JOHN DAVID SMITH
Charlotte Observer, December 15, 2007

A SLAVE NO MORE: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
By David W. Blight. Harcourt. 320 pages. $25.

In his award-winning "Race and Reunion," Yale historian David W. Blight identified three essential ways that post-Civil War era Americans remembered the bloody internecine conflict.

Reconciliationists focused on healing the deeply divided Union. White supremacists remembered the war in markedly Southern, pro-slavery terms. Emancipationists recalled that slavery had caused the war, that freeing the slaves was its foremost result, and that blacks participated fully in their own liberation.

Blight's remarkable new "A Slave No More" unveils the lives and post-emancipation narratives of two escaped slaves, John M. Washington (1838-1918) and Wallace Turnage (1846-1916). Blight's book underscores as never before the emancipationist historical memory of slavery and the Civil War.

By publishing Washington and Turnage's previously unknown and unedited emancipation narratives, researching the authors' lives as slaves and citizens, and in deconstructing and contextualizing their texts, Blight documents what he terms "the anguished and glorious liberation of four million American slaves from generations of bondage."

Readers will find "A Slave No More" a fast-paced, intriguing and original work, an historical detective work par excellence.

For the rest of the review, please click here.

Lou Ureneck's BACKCAST on MaineToday.com

More Books
December 11, 2007, MaineToday.com

Speaking of good books to give anglers for Christmas, I must mention Lou Ureneck’s Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska. Some Mainers may remember Lou from his years as editor of the Portland Press Herald. Although he left town for other challenges, and is now chairman of the journalism department at Boston University, he still remembers where the good fishing holes are in Maine and remembers what to do when he gets there.

And I’m not just saying this because Lou is my boss. Really.

Backcast is the true account of an Alaskan fishing trip he took with his teenage son to try to restore the father-son relationship after a difficult divorce. The son wasn’t too keen on the idea of the trip, or of restoring the relationship, which he apparently didn’t think was as badly damaged as Lou thought it was. The two of them were dropped off by a float plane in the Alaska wilderness and spent the next nine days in an inflatable raft floating down an icy river for which they didn’t even have a good map, encountering along the way menacing bears, countless salmon and char, and, of course, each other. It’s a tale very well told, and one that many fathers and sons who have bonded on fishing trips will relate to.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Christopher Lane Q&A in Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Q&A / CHRISTOPHER LANE, author: Experts play with people's emotions

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 12/09/07

Christopher Lane is the Miller research professor at Northwestern University and the author of the newly published "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness."

His last book, "Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England," explored misanthropy, or people-hating, in the 19th century. "One of the things I was trying to do in this new book was think about what happened to misanthropes in the 20th and even 21st century," Lane said.

"As one psychiatrist that I interviewed put it, 'Well, they probably all got medicated, right?' Although his response was a bit glib, the risk is that indeed a lot of these emotions have been distorted or interfered with through medication."

Lane's book focuses on the process by which the psychiatric "bible" —- the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" —- was revised in the 1970s and '80s by a task force of specialists appointed by the American Psychiatric Association.

The AJC spoke with Lane recently by phone. Here is an edited transcript of that conversation:

Q. You were able to review hundreds of documents pertaining to the 1980 revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual —- documents that offered a glimpse of the process that few people had ever had before. What were some of the things that surprised you most in those files?

A. I was astonished at the carelessness of the psychiatrists and the degree to which their own self-interest often trumped scientific rigor. There are tremendous revelations of their own ambition and their willingness to sacrifice scientific rigor on the altar of expediency.

For the rest of the Q&A, click here.

Anthony T. Kronman's EDUCATION'S END Mentioned in Inside Higher Ed

On College Costs, Be Careful What You Wish For

By William G. Durden
Inside Higher Ed, December 10, 2007

... If higher education institutions wanted to contain escalating costs and price, they could also look to a second business model that would, in essence, put a “cap” on new knowledge. When American universities were first founded, the course of study was an unchanging corpus of knowledge that was judged finite and comprehensible in its totality. This position was inherited from our European predecessors and practiced there for centuries. In the words of Anthony T. Kronman in his recent book, Education’s End, “The classicist view of antiquity was essentially static. It paid little or no attention to its historical development ….[M]eaning and value of that world …[ resided] … in a set of timeless forms, transparent to the intellect and permanently available as standards of judgment….” Indeed, such a static view of knowledge and its the accompanying “business model” kept cost — and tuition — down by ignoring that pesky cost driver, new knowledge.

For the rest of the article, please click here.

Rachel Herz's THE SCENT OF DESIRE in Detroit Free Press

SHORT TAKES

Detroit Free Press, December 9, 2007

Sweet and sexy, smells connect

You'll never take your nose for granted again once you've read "The Scent of Desire."

Rachel Herz explores what is considered our most mysterious sense, and the one often dismissed as the least important. But, as Herz points out, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. (People who have lost their sense of smell often become dangerously depressed.)

Herz examines the connection between taste and odor and the role smell plays in sexual attraction, as well as its power to evoke long-suppressed memories. But best are the weird facts. "Clean baby" is one of the very few smells every culture agrees is delightful.

For the rest of the article, please click here.

Lou Ureneck's BACKCAST in Boston Globe

On Alaska trip, a father fishes for a way to reconnect with his son
By Chuck Leddy
December 6, 2007, Boston Globe

Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska, By Lou Ureneck St. Martin's, 286 pp., $24.95
more stories like this

"Backcast," by Brookline resident Lou Ureneck, is difficult to categorize and impossible to forget. It might be described as a stunning memoir, a marvelous outdoor adventure, or a breathtaking travelogue that explores the wilds of Alaska and the intricacies of the human heart. Whatever it is, it's wonderful.

The narrative centers on rafting down a river in Alaska, where the author and his teenage son fish. The story flows smoothly from past to present. In Ureneck's skillful hands, time itself is a river that bends in many directions, and the carefully constructed account weaves the deep, dark past with the turbulent present. The river trip seems simple on the surface, but Ureneck dives deep to explore the shipwreck that his life has become. He's just divorced his wife of two decades and grown distant from Adam, his sullen son.

For the rest of the article, please click here.

Lou Ureneck's BACKCAST in Seattle Times

"Backcast" | A father's promise, a boy's reward

By Susan Gilmore
The Seattle Times, Thursday, December 6, 2007

"Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-Fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska"
by Lou Ureneck
St. Martin's Press, 304 pp., $24.95

There must be an easier way for a father to reconnect with his teenage son after a failed marriage than spending thousands of dollars to go to the remote regions of Alaska on a fishing trip.

But then, Lou Ureneck was a fisherman. No matter that he'd never been to Alaska before, and the fact his son was not exactly a willing companion.

Years earlier, when he was on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and his son was living with him, Ureneck and his son were sitting at the kitchen table tying trout flies and talking about fishing: "Adam, tell you what. When you graduate from high school, that summer, we'll go fishing in Alaska."

It was an expensive, extravagant promise; with gear, airfare, lodging and guides, it would cost the equivalent of a semester's tuition at a private college.

For the rest of the review, please click here.

David Blight's A SLAVE NO MORE Reviewed in NYT

Freedom Just Ahead: The War Within the Civil War
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: New York Times, December 5, 2007

The chaos of Civil War meant only one thing to America’s four million slaves: hope. With armies on the march, and the old social order crumbling, men like John Washington and Wallace Turnage seized the moment and made a break for freedom, issuing their own emancipation proclamations before the fact. They were “quiet heroes of a war within the war to destroy slavery,” as David W. Blight puts it in “A Slave No More.”

A SLAVE NO MORE

Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
By David W. Blight
Illustrated. 307 pages. Harcourt. $25.

Both Washington and Turnage, near contemporaries, wrote vivid accounts of their lives as slaves and the bold bids for freedom that took them across Confederate lines and into the waiting arms of Union soldiers. Recently discovered, both texts have been reproduced by Mr. Blight as written, with misspellings and grammatical errors intact.

Mr. Blight, a professor of American history at Yale and the author of “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” has also provided an extended preface that provides historical context, fills in biographical gaps and extends the life stories of both men past the Civil War, when their manuscripts break off abruptly, to their deaths in the early 20th century. Two remarkable lives, previously lost, emerge with startling clarity, largely through the words of the principal actors themselves.

For the rest of the article, please click here. Blight—as well as two descendants of John Washington—was also interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday.

Interview with Dr. Rachel Herz, author of Scent of Desire on Nerve.com

Brut Force
An expert on "smell psychology" describes how the fragrance industry has ruined modern mating.
by Catrinel Bartolomeu
Nerve.com, November 27, 2007

When I made out with Matt behind the arts-and-crafts building the summer after eighth grade, his breath smelled like tennis balls. Then, a few years ago, I opened a can of tennis balls close to my face and caught a whiff of that rubbery glue. I immediately remembered Matt's sharp, speckled cheekbone lit by a fluorescent light. I liked making out with him then, I like the memory of it today, and I play tennis often.

This phenomenon is explained in The Scent of Desire, a new book by Rachel Herz, a psychologist widely recognized as the world's leading expert on the influences of smell. Using everything from cognitive-behavioral techniques to MRIs, Herz explains how our olfactory abilities help determine who we date, who we dump and what we buy, be it the directionless unemployed loser we can't stop thinking about, the gorgeous heart surgeon who repulses us, or the strawberry-scented car freshener that, for some reason, turns us on every time we slide into our hatchback. — Catrinel Bartolomeu

Your book is the first scholarly study I've read that talks about the phenomenon of breaking up with someone because of their smell. I've actually ended relationships for that reason. It's a relief to have that validated.
Our body odor is the external manifestation of our immune system. The immune-system match is particularly important for women because they have a huge cost to bear in terms of the time and energy it takes to reproduce. If the goal is to go forth and multiply, you want to make sure that any child you have is going to survive and reproduce, and the most important thing in that respect is that they're healthy. But there's no Brad Pitt of body odor — it's about the fit between your immune system and somebody else's. His immune system can't be too close to yours because it might pair up something bad. Women's sensitivity to scent is highest during ovulation, when it's most important that you're making the correct choice. But this is all thrown out of whack if you're on the pill.

Lou Ureneck and BACKCAST on NPR

Alaska Trip Helps Heal Father and Son in 'Backcast'
Weekend Edition Saturday, December 1, 2007 ·

Listen Here.

For Lou Ureneck, an Alaska fishing trip tested not just his survival skills, but the survival of his frayed relationship with his son.

The author of Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska traveled to Alaska in 2000. The trip was an attempt to heal his relationship with his teenage son, Adam, following a bitter divorce. Ureneck's journey helped him reflect on his parenting skills and on the gaping hole his own father left when he abandoned Ureneck at age 7.

For the rest of the story, please click here.

Wendy Quoted in Boston Globe

Kennedy agrees to pen memoirs in lucrative deal
Senator's family life and political career to be focus of book
By Susan Milligan
Globe Staff / November 27, 2007

WASHINGTON - Senator Edward M. Kennedy has agreed to a multimillion dollar deal with Hachette Book Group USA to pen his memoirs, giving the veteran Massachusetts lawmaker a forum for his own perspective on a life and career that has been examined by others in countless books and articles, negotiators of the deal confirmed yesterday.

Neither Kennedy's office nor the publishing house would reveal the size of the package, but a publishing figure familiar with the deal said Kennedy's payment was one of the largest in history, eclipsing the $8 million given to New York Senator Hillary Clinton. Former President Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair each got a reported $10 million for their memoirs.

... Wendy Strothman, a Boston literary agent, said that while some publishers accept losses on autobiographies by famous people because they want the prestige of the deal, a Kennedy book would likely sell well.

"I'll go out and buy it," Strothman said.

For the rest of the article, please click here.

Article on David Blight & A SLAVE NO MORE in Daily Press

Newly discovered memoirs open a closed chapter of a slave's life
By RUSTY DENNEN
The Free Lance-Star, November 25, 2007

FREDERICKSBURG, Va. - In the spring of 1862, slave John Washington stood along the Fredericksburg shore of the Rappahannock River, about to embark on what he had yearned for all his life _ his journey to freedom.

Washington's granddaughter, Ruth Washington, and great-great-granddaughter, Maureen Ramos, stood at the same spot earlier this month, at what is now Old Mill Park. They came to pay their respects to a man they are just now beginning to know.

At dusk, under a crisp autumn sky, Ruth Washington, 89, looked out at the water.

"I can visualize my grandfather, trying to get across to freedom. For him to pursue and be persistent to become a free man," she said. "That's what he wanted. His story to be told."

For the rest of the article, please click here.

Rachel Herz, author of Scent of Desire Interviewed on Marketplace

How to make it smell like a sale
Marketplace, November 22, 2007

Retailers know consumers can't negotiate with their nose when it finds something it likes. Lisa Napoli talks to Rachel Herz, author of "The Scent of Desire," about how some stores are using smell to seal the deal.

Lisa Napoli: On this day dedicated to food, you're probably grateful for your sense of taste. What about your sense of smell? Rachel Herz has just written a book called "The Scent of Desire." She says smell is the retailer's dream.

Rachel Herz: Cinnabon is a classic example, which uses the scent of its fabulous cinnamon buns to lure passersby to want to have a cinnamon bun. Actually, KFC is another one who's recently gotten on this bandwagon, and Exxon On The Run, they have been adding a coffee scent to their brewing kiosks, and apparently sales have increased 55 percent for coffee. So this is the example or literal scent marketing -- where you've the scent that's obviously connected to what you're selling in order to augment sales.

Napoli: Back to the Cinnabon/KFC example, those places, they, they're enhancing the smell of their already existing smells that are coming out of the stores with the food they're making?

Herz: That's right. So they're either using their own real smells or they're actually using synthetics that are being pumped out into the environment where they're being sold. So you can kind of tell, depending upon if they're actually really cooking in the establishment or if it's in a place like a sterile mall, where they couldn't possibly doing any baking, and yet you're still getting this overwhelming aroma of Cinnabon, let's just say.

For the rest of the interview, or to listen to the audio, please click here.

Rachel Herz's THE SCENT OF DESIRE Reviewed in Seattle Times

"The Scent of Desire" | Intriguing analysis of smell
By Alan Moores,
Seattle Times, November 18, 2007

"The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell"
by Rachel Herz
Morrow, 288 pp., $24.95

What better praise to give a nonfiction book than to say it will transform the way its readers think about its subject. In Rachel Herz's case, the subject is our sense of smell.

Herz, a visiting professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, is one of the world's leading researchers in this young field, and one of the field's better explainers, variously turning up in The New Yorker or NPR or U.S. News & World Report to share her findings.

In "The Scent of Desire," she starts with the notion of inherently "bad" smells. They don't exist, she argues, offering as evidence, among other things, her own love of skunk essence, or infants' acceptance — even love? — of the smell of feces, or our military's failure to develop an all-purpose stink bomb, even in using "U.S. Army issue latrine scent."

Likewise, she debunks the notion of any inherently "healthful" smells in, say, aromatherapy. She doesn't discount its use in a relaxing environment — say, in a hot bath or on a massage table — but adds: "there is no scientific evidence in humans that by inhaling sandalwood aroma the essence of sandalwood is detectable in the bloodstream — which it would have to be if it were producing a pharmacological effect."

For the rest of the review, please click here.

David Blight's A SLAVE NO MORE in Washington Post

Who really freed America's slaves?
By Jonathan Yardley
Washington Post, Sunday, November 18, 2007; BW15

A SLAVE NO MORE
Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
By David W. Blight
Harcourt. 307 pp. $25

In American mythology, the freeing of the slaves is a top-to-bottom affair: Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, and after that it was up to government to ensure their rights, though for about a century government didn't exactly do a good job of it. David W. Blight makes plain that it never was as simple as that. After careful study of two recently discovered memoirs by former slaves, John M. Washington and Wallace Turnage, Blight writes:

"American emancipation was always a complex interplay between at least four factors: the geographical course of the war; the size of the slave population in any given region; the policies enforced at any given time by the Union and Confederate governments through their military forces; and the volition of slaves themselves in seizing their moments to embrace a reasonable chance for freedom. Turnage's and Washington's narratives throw into bold relief and confirm the significance of each of these factors. To the perennial question -- who freed the slaves, Lincoln or blacks themselves? -- the Turnage and Washington stories answer conclusively that it was both. Without the Union armies and navies, neither man would have achieved freedom when he did. But they never would have gained their freedom without their own courageous initiative, either."

This is somewhat slippery ground, for inherent in it is the danger of generalizing from the particular -- and in this case, an exceedingly small and selective particular. At the time of emancipation, only about 10 percent of freed slaves could read and write; Washington and Turnage were in that 10 percent. Though reliable documentation of the slaves' response to the Emancipation Proclamation is sparse, we know that if their general reaction was jubilation, some also expressed caution and uncertainty. And, of course, in the places where the proclamation was intended to take effect -- the states of the Confederacy -- emancipation was nothing more than Union rhetoric unless and until federal forces arrived. By no means was it guaranteed even then, as the racial views of many Union soldiers were not discernibly different from those of Rebel soldiers, and their enthusiasm for enforcing emancipation was decidedly limited.

For the rest of the article, please click here.

Blogged: David Blight and A SLAVE NO MORE Event

Walking the Road from Slavery to Freedom With John Washington
From Civil War Memory Blog by Kevin Levin

I don't really know how to begin this post about my experience yesterday in Fredericksburg other than to say that it reminded me of just why I find the study of history and the Civil War in particular to be so important. It was a whirlwind day that began in the afternoon with a tour of John Washington's Fredericksburg through his own words and memories. Michaela and I were honored to be included in the afternoon tour which included Ruth A. Washington, granddaughter of John Washington and his great-great granddaughter, Maureen F. Ramos. I was conscious throughout the tour that they were hearing the story of their ancestor for the first time. For me it was a meaningful and entertaining way to broaden my own understanding of the past through the words of an actual participant. However, as much as I was moved by Washington's own words for Ruth and Maureen it was a much more personal and profound experience.

For the rest of the blog entry as well as a picture, please click here.

Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES in Publisher's Weekly

High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed
Michael Kodas. Hyperion, $24.95 (368p) ISBN 978-1-4013-0273-3
Publishers Weekly, Nov. 19, 2007

Journalist Kodas has written a disturbing account of stupidity and greed on the slopes of Mount Everest. On assignment for the Hartford Courant in 2004, Kodas joined an expedition led by a couple who had summited the mountain more than a dozen times between them. As he moved up Everest, Kodas watched his expedition disintegrate in a mess of recriminations, thefts, lies and violence. At the same time, a sociopathic guide was leading a 69-year-old doctor to his death on the unforgiving slopes. The twin disasters led Kodas to delve into the commercialization of Mount Everest, and to discover that such experiences were becoming a depressing norm. A thorough reporter, Kodas does an excellent job exposing the ways in which money and ego have corrupted the traditional cultures of both mountaineers and their Sherpa guides. He also brings a painful focus to the delusions, misunderstandings and indifference that allow climbers to literally step over the bodies of dying people on their way to the top. Oddly enough, Kodas writes less ably about himself, and the reasons for his own expedition's collapse remain unclear; the sequencing of story lines is confusing as well. Nevertheless, his narrative is as hard to turn away from as a slow-motion train wreck. (Feb.)

For other reviews in this article, please click here.

Freada Kapor Klein's GIVING NOTICE mentioned in Boston Globe

Our bittersweet 16
By Anita F. Hill
November 19, 2007, Boston Globe

...Despite high-profile suits, a woman's chance of winning a valid sexual harassment case is by no means certain. My letters confirm that most women can't afford or don't care to file a lawsuit. In her book, "Giving Notice: Why the Best and Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay," Freada Kapor Klein recommends structural and institutional changes to eliminate the entrenched discrimination that permeates corporate settings so that fewer suits are needed.

"Self empowerment," a natural response to loss of faith in systems, is a theme repeated in many of the letters. And new ways of achieving that goal have emerged. Elisabeth Babcock of Boston's Crittenton Women's Union uses technology and research to help low-income women achieve "personal and economic independence," which will lessen their vulnerability to workplace abuses. Her online forum invites women to give voice to their concerns and triumphs....

For the rest of the article, please click here.

Lou Ureneck's Backcast wins the National Outdoor Book Award

Outdoor Literature Category
Winner. Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska. By Lou Ureneck. St. Martins Press, New York. ISBN 9780312371517.

Backcast plays out like the long and splendid arc of a fly line, unfurling on an Alaskan river trip that Lou Ureneck has arranged to re-connect with his son. As the trip progresses, Ureneck reflects back on his own life while adroitly capturing the sometimes hilarious and sometimes serious interactions between himself and his son. The result is a realistic and heartwarming story of a father and his son -- and a work of outdoor literature of the highest order.

For the other winners, please click here.

Lour Ureneck's Backcast in the Star-Ledger

A fisherman's catch: The son who got away
BY PETER GENOVESE
Star-Ledger, Wednesday, November 14, 2007

A river has always run through Lou Ureneck's life. In his childhood, there was the little river that flowed in a broad curve behind Gorski's Hardware in Spotswood. There, he would catch catfish, bluegills, yellow perch and once a 34-inch chain pickerel that won him the local fishing derby.

Later, after his family moved to Toms River, it was the Metedeconk River, where he would put out traps for blue-claw crabs and swim in the muddy water. After that, it was a brook that ran under a railroad trestle in Keyport, where he would use bloodworms to catch flounder.

Seven years ago, it was the Kanektok River in western Alaska, where Ureneck, then 49, hoped to close the rift that had developed between the newspaper editor and his son, Adam, then 18. Ureneck had been divorced from Adam's mother for a year, and his son was angry and bitter.

"I have to admit the trip was a little desperate," Ureneck writes in "Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska" (St. Martin's Press, $24.95).

"My life was in a ditch," Ureneck continues. "I was broke from lawyers, therapists and alimony payments and fearful that my son's anger was hardening into lifelong permanence. I wanted to pull him back into my life. I feared losing him. Alaska was my answer."

It was almost their undoing; the trip was challenging and harrowing. There was an encounter with a 9-foot-tall brown bear, and a scary, surreal trip through a twisty, varicose-veined section of the Kanektok called the Braids.

"I'm a furious rewriter," Ureneck said by phone from his office at Boston University, where he is chairman of the Department of Journalism. "I must have rewritten the opening section 30-40 times."

"Backcast" is a compelling read, part true adventure, part commentary on fatherhood and life's twists and turns.

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David Blight's A SLAVE NO MORE is a November “Significant 7” title on Amazon!

From Amazon's Significant Seven

Spotlight Title: A SLAVE NO MORE by David Blight

Most Americans have learned about the history of slavery and emancipation in the United States through a haphazard combination of grade-school textbooks, Hollywood films, and one of the most-watched TV miniseries of all time. Of the more than four million enslaved before the Civil War, only a handful of their first-person narratives have survived. Needless to say, the rediscovery of two narratives of self-emancipation is both a major historic and a literary event. In A Slave No More, esteemed historian David Blight has faithfully transcribed the unique manuscripts of John Washington (1838-1918) and Wallace Turnage (1846-1916), which were both recently brought to light from family archives. Washington and Turnage's accounts of their early lives in bondage and daring flights to freedom--through the chaotic Union army lines and perilous Alabama swamps respectively--are nothing less than riveting. In their capacity to express their authors' profound humanity in the face of the worst brutality, their words rise off the page as resilient and relevant as when they were first written. Blight devotes the first half of the book to four short essays in which he masterfully reconstructs the men's biographies and larger family histories, taking great care to bring the detail and drama of their individual lives into focus against the larger canvas of American history. But to feel the full impact of Washington and Turnage's stories, readers are urged to begin with their own words on page 162 before returning to Blight's excellent histories. --Lauren

For the other Amazon Significant Seven Books, please click here.

Lou Ureneck's Backcast Book of the Month for National Geographic Traveler

Trip Lit: New Books that Transport Us
By Don George, National Geographic Traveler

Book of the Month:
Backcast, by Lou Ureneck

This deeply moving memoir explores two uncharted territories: the wilderness of Alaska, specifically the Kanektok River in the southwestern part of the state, and the wilderness of Parenthood, specifically the region where a recently divorced father and his teenage son try to find new ways to understand each other. I have never been to Alaska, but I've been wandering the land of Parenthood for two decades now, and Ureneck presents a clear-eyed portrait of its tundras and torrents, valleys and peaks. This makes me trust and appreciate all the more his keenly detailed evocations of Alaska.

Like the Kanektok River, Ureneck's narrative races along, braiding memories of his own fatherless upbringing and failed attempts to become the father he never had with his account of a poorly planned one-week post-graduation rafting trip with his son in the unforgiving wild. Ureneck's powers of perception and analysis have been stripped raw by life, and his writing is spare and sinewy; the prose resonates with authenticity on every page, whether he is talking about the misery of awaking in a soaking-wet sleeping bag or in a disintegrating marriage.

The Alaskan wilderness leaps to life in its gritty reality—fast-rushing rivers, misty rolling hills, bears "the size of church doors," relentless rainfalls, eddies roiling with fat salmon and char—just as the tenuous terrain between father and son leaps to life too. Anger and hurt thread through this book—but so do taut stretches of beauty, wonder, and redemption in the riches of life in the wild.

By the end of the journey, this fraying camping and fishing pilgrimage has become a metaphor for something far greater: a desperate attempt to fix the heart of this father-son relationship in the larger heart of Alaska. To Ureneck's credit, his humble, honest odyssey touches and transforms the Alaska in us all.

To see the other books reviewed in this article, please click here.

Raymond Arsenault Wins Southern History Prize

Raymond Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, is the recipient of the 2007 Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award. Announced at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Richmond, Virginia, on November 1, the award recognizes Arsenault’s book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, as the most important book published in the field of Southern history in 2006. A critically acclaimed study of the 1961 nonviolent movement that challenged the Jim Crow tradition of racially segregated buses, trains, and terminals, Freedom Riders was published as part the Pivotal Moments in American History series issued by Oxford University Press and co-edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historians David Hackett Fischer and James McPherson. Previously the book was selected as an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review, as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the Washington Post Bookworld, as a featured choice of the History Book Club, and as a 2006 Honorable Mention Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. Freedom Riders has also been selected for documentary film adaptation by WGBH-Boston’s “American Experience” public television series, with an expected release in May 2011, the fiftieth anniversary of the first Freedom Ride.

Christopher Lane, Author of Shyness, Article in Washington Post

Shy? Or Something More Serious?

By Christopher Lane
Special to The Washington Post, Tuesday, November 6, 2007; Page HE01

If anyone in my parents' generation had argued that shyness and other run-of-the-mill behaviors might one day be called mental disorders, most people would probably have laughed or stared in disbelief. At the time, wallflowers were often admired as modest and geeks considered bookish. Those who were shy might sometimes have been thought awkward -- my musically gifted mother certainly was -- but their reticence fell within the range of normal behavior. When their discomfort was pronounced, the American Psychiatric Association called it "anxiety neurosis," a psychoanalytic term that encouraged talk-related treatment.

All that changed in February 1980, when the APA classified the broadly defined "avoidant personality disorder" and "social phobia" (later dubbed "social anxiety disorder") as diseases. The professional group also listed 110 other new disorders in its revised diagnostic manual, with the result that the total number of mental illnesses on the books almost doubled overnight. It was a dramatic example of the modern medicalization of behavior.

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Christopher Lane's Shyness Mentioned in LA Times

Are we too quick to medicate children?
Parents who seek help for behavioral problems are increasingly likely to walk away with a prescription for powerful drugs. But some experts counsel caution.
By Melissa Healy
Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2007

Northwestern University's Christopher Lane, author of a new book, "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness," calls psychiatry's growing focus on children "the perfect storm" for overdiagnosis.

"You've got a constituency -- children -- who cannot make informed medical decisions for themselves," Lane says. In a fast-moving culture that heaps stress and high expectations on children, "parents are in many cases under great pressure to ensure their child succeeds and is socially proficient. A child that doesn't negotiate rapidly those hurdles can look very quickly as if he or she is falling behind, or displaying behavior that warrants medical concern."

Some mental-health professionals are wary, too, of the implied promise of early intervention. In fact, whether, how or in how many cases a child's problematic behavior leads to full-blown mental illness -- what health professionals call the "progression" of the disease -- is in many cases not well understood, especially when the patient is not even a teenager yet.

As to the claim that early treatment will lessen symptoms or prevent mental illness later, there is growing evidence, but it is hardly a slam-dunk. And it doesn't address which kids will benefit from pharmacological treatment and which won't.

As the mental-health profession begins debate over how to update its diagnostic manual, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which is set for reissue in 2012, it is debating whether it has gone too far. The recent publication of two books critical of the expansion of psychiatric diagnoses -- Lane's "Shyness" and "The Loss of Sadness," by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield -- have touched off a flurry of discussion.

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Freada Kapor Klein, Author of Giving Notice, Article in San Francisco Chronicle

Early admissions policies give children of the rich an edge
Mitch Kapor,Freada Kapor Klein
San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, November 4, 2007

This week the College Board released its annual report on college pricing - and as many feared, tuitions continue to rise, while the average Pell Grant, the cornerstone of federal funding for higher education, failed for the fourth year in a row to keep pace with inflation.

For the wealthy, however, their own affirmative action is just heating up. Early admissions - the first round of college admissions deadlines - are upon us. The lucky few who are chosen are exempted from the agony of completing dozens of applications and the daily ritual of anxiously checking the mail or the Internet next spring once colleges have decided.

Early admission provides an opportunity for students who are ready to commit to a college or university to know whether the feelings are mutual. For colleges, it is their chance to lock in a portion of their freshman class with high GPAs or excellent test scores or unique talents.

Everyone wins, right? Not exactly. As it turns out, applicants for early admissions slots are not just lucky and not just the most qualified. They have better odds of getting in than do regular applicants, but only wealthy students who don't need financial aid can afford to make their choice based solely on the school they think they'd like to attend. Recognizing the inherent unfairness, Harvard and Princeton have ended this practice.

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Freada Kapor Klein's Giving Notice in Miami Herald

To retain workers, keep them engaged
Three books offer ideas on how companies can help workers feel valued and respected, which will then enhance their productivity and reduce employee turnover.
BY RICHARD PACHTER
rap@WordsonWords.com
Miami Herald, Monday, November 5, 2007

Giving Notice: Why the Best and Brightest are Leaving the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay. Freada Kapor Klein. Jossey-Bass. 240 pages.

Klein looks at the problem from the angle of diversity. It's an extremely worthwhile approach, since not taking individuals' needs and backgrounds into consideration is a sure way to communicate to them that they do not matter. I once visited a firm that had a Christmas display featuring stockings with names for each employee in that office, with one exception: a non-Christian. They chose to just not include her, which was possibly well intended, but sent a message of exclusion, nonetheless. Considering that they had gone to great lengths to recruit this person for the position, a bit more thought should have been given to the matter. Kapor cites similar instances in which ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation issues impeded the career development of individuals and affected firms' abilities to retain talented and productive workers. She proposes a number of common-sense remedies, most of which involve consideration and communication.

For the other books reviewed in this article, please click here.

Christopher Lane's Shyness Reviewed in Wall Street Journal

Diagnosis: Diffident
Why psychiatry's field-guide approach sometimes mistakes temperament for illness
By PAUL MCHUGH
Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2007; Page W8

If you were anxious about speaking in public, would you prefer to be called (1) a "social phobic" needing a pill; (2) a "neurotic" needing psychoanalysis; or (3) a shy person needing practice and coaching? I'd opt for No. 3, but not everyone agrees. Certainly some people have been helped by pills for social phobia and would swear by No. 1. In "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness," Christopher Lane seems to favor No. 2 -- but that might have been expected, since he appears to have brought an affection for Freudian psychoanalysis to his investigations.

To his credit, Mr. Lane, a professor of literature at Northwestern University, notes that when psychiatrists diagnose the shy as suffering from social phobia, they mistake a variation in human temperament for a mental disorder; if anything, the diagnosis only adds to the sense of unease felt by shy people. He is also right in observing that the psychiatrists' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the profession's standard 900-page reference work, errs by designating other kinds of normal human variation as mental disorders and so exaggerates the incidence of mental illness.

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Lou Ureneck's Backcast Slide Show

An audio slide show about Backcast produced by BU Today, Boston University's daily magazine.

http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news-cms/news/index.php?dept=4&id=47447&template=7&

Ronald Florence's Lawrence and Aaronsohn Reviewed in Harvard Magazine

Off the Shelf
Recent books with Harvard connections
From Harvard Magazine, September/October 2007

Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Ronald Florence, Ph.D. ’69 (Viking, $27.95). Two colleagues in British intelligence had conflicting obsessions that presaged the Arab-Israeli conflict. As the Ottoman empire faltered, one of the two (an archaeologist from Oxfordshire, later Lawrence of Arabia) promoted Arab nationalism. The other (a Jewish agronomist from Palestine) hoped for a new Jewish state. Each was cocksure. Historian and novelist Florence tells their story well.

For the other books reviewed in this article, please click here.

Rachel Herz, Scent of Desire in USA Today Books

Roundup: Non-fiction, in brief
By Deirdre Donahue, Bob Minzesheimer, Jacqueline Blais and Jocelyn McClurg
USA TODAY, November 1

The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell
By Rachel Herz
William Morrow, 266 pp., $24.95

You'll never take your nose for granted again once you've read The Scent of Desire. Rachel Herz explores what is considered our most mysterious sense, and the one often dismissed as the least important. But as Herz points out, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. (People who have lost their sense of smell often become dangerously depressed.) Herz examines the connection between taste and odor and the role smell plays in sexual attraction, as well as its power to evoke long-suppressed memories. But best are the weird facts. "Clean baby" is one of the very few smells every culture agrees is delightful.

For the rest of the books in this article, click here.

Marlene Zuk mentioned in NYT Science Times

Cockroaches, Reconsidered
Tara Parker-Pope, on Health
New York Times, Science October 31, 2007

While sitting in a New York City diner with my daughter recently, I felt a tickle on my foot. A cockroach had settled there, waving his (or her) antennae. I jumped up, screamed and stomped in one quick motion. Then the food arrived.

I had a choice to make. Should we stay and eat? Did this one bug signal a larger infestation lurking in the kitchen? Or was I overreacting? The answer to all three questions, I have since learned, is “yes.’’

As is often the case when things make me squeamish, I called Dr. Marlene Zuk, a University of California, Riverside biologist whose book “Riddled With Life’’ celebrates germs and parasites. But Dr. Zuk sided with the cockroach. I wouldn’t have squashed a butterfly had one landed on me, she noted. “There is nothing per se that is yucky about cockroaches,’’ said Dr. Zuk. “The ick factor is all psychological. Cockroaches are nice, lovely, interesting animals.” Some roaches, she noted, are even monogamous.

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Anthony Lewis Freedom for the Thought That We Hate in Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly, 10/22

Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: Tales of the First Amendment, Anthony Lewis. Basic, $25 (224p) ISBN 978-0-465-03917-3

The First Amendment’s injunction that “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” seems cut and dried, but its application has had a vexed history, according to this lucid legal history, Lewis’s first book in 15 years (after Make No Law and Gideon’s Trumpet).

For the rest of this and other reviews, click here.

Ronald Florence's Lawrence and Aaronsohn in the New Yorker

The New Yorker, October 29, 2007
Books Briefly Noted

Lawrence and Aaronsohn
by Ronald Florence (Viking; $27.95)

Florence chronicles the birth of the modern Middle East by narrating the intersecting lives of two remarkable men. The portrait of T. E. Lawrence—a deeply British romantic who, despite his talent as a tactician, was unable to deliver on his promises to the Arab fighters he had led during the First World War—is persuasive if not particularly original. Florence is clearly much more taken with the less celebrated Aaron Aaronsohn, a brilliant agronomist instrumental to the survival of early Zionist settlements in Palestine. He became a spy for the British, at great risk to himself and his family. (His sister was tortured by Turkish officers who suspected her, correctly, of assisting in the espionage.) Florence skillfully blends geopolitical history and cloak-and-dagger tales but, regrettably, includes no detailed portrait of any Arab figure; the Arabs serve, instead, to inspire or frustrate the designs of others, whether British, Jewish, or Turkish. ♦

For the article, please click here.

Christopher Lane Shyness Reviewed in Examiner

Phobia or faux-bia?
The Examiner, October 23, 2007
Robin Tierner

WASHINGTON— Shyness, fear of public speaking, reluctance to dine alone in restaurants — common discomforts or mental disorders?

Medicalizing ordinary emotions has generated big business for the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatric profession. In the new book “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness,” Christopher Lane examines the impact on health care and society when psychiatry’s bible, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), swelled from handbook into heavy tome detailing hundreds of new conditions such as social anxiety disorder, known as SAD.

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Christopher Lane's Shyness Receives Starred Review in Library Journal

From Library Journal, October 15, 2007

*Lane, Christopher. Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. Yale Univ. Oct. 2007. c.272p. photogs. index. ISBN 978-0-300-12446-0. $27.50. PSYCH

Lane (English, Northwestern Univ.; Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England) takes on the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and big pharma, asserting that for self-serving reasons involving control and profit they have colluded to create new psychiatric diagnoses demonizing shyness and demanding treatment by drugs such as Paxil. Having gained access to archival materials from the APA, Lane provides a behind-the-scenes look at the haphazard, unscientific process used to revise The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, along with the equally unscientific procession of drug studies funded by the very pharmaceutical companies that most stand to profit from endorsement of those drugs by the investigating psychiatrists. This superb, iconoclastic cultural study might well be compared to Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, two major works by Michel Foucault exploring the social construction of ideas and institutions. Highly recommended for university and large public libraries.-Lynne F. Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law Lib., PA

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Rachel Herz Interview in the October Issue of Self Magazine

Check out Rachel Herz, author of The Scent of Desire, interviewed in the current issue of Self Magazine, page 221.

Christopher Lane's SHYNESS reviewed in The New York Observer.

Blushing, Once a Virtue, Now a Symptom
by Juliet Lapidos
The New York Observer, October 16, 2007
SHYNESS: HOW NORMAL BEHAVIOR BECAME A SICKNESS
By Christopher Lane
Yale University Press, 263 pages, $27.50

Every student of medical history knows that the psychiatric establishment is not immune to fads and fallacies. A Victorian physician once estimated that a quarter of all women suffer from “hysteria”—a vague, catchall diagnosis modern psychiatrists have banished from clinical circles. Remember learning about “multiple personality disorder” from Primal Fear and Fight Club? That’s probably a canard, too. In his excellent new book, Shyness, Christopher Lane identifies another dubious mental illness. Perhaps you’ve read about it on highway billboards: It’s called social anxiety disorder.

Mr. Lane traces the discovery—or rather the creation—of social anxiety disorder to the late 1970’s, when the American Psychiatric Association updated its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A small group of leading psychiatrists deleted a few entries, tweaked others, and added dozens of new mental illnesses. The science behind these sweeping revisions was shockingly flimsy. Mr. Lane reveals that the task force members conducted little systematic research, and often based their conclusions on ambiguous studies.

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Jessie Gruman & Aftershock in The Capital Times

Cancer tale is triply inspirational
Debra Carr-Elsing
The Capital Times, 10/16/2007

... After interviewing more than 200 patients and their families, as well as hospital chaplains, doctors and nurses, Gruman wrote a book, "AfterShock: What To Do When The Doctor Gives You -- Or Someone You Love -- A Devastating Diagnosis" (Walker & Co., 2007; paperback, $16.95). She will talk about her new book and how to move forward during a medical crisis at a free community presentation Thursday night at Monona Terrace.

"Every year, thousands of Americans get terrible medical news about cancer, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, ALS and other life-altering diseases, and they have to absorb this information into lives that are pretty full already," Gruman says.

Besides that, in the few weeks after a devastating diagnosis, there's no time in your life when it's more important to really understand your options, Gruman adds. In her book, she offers suggestions to help families navigate that journey.

"People are very resilient, and they should know that the intense sense of loss and despair that they feel when they first get bad medical news will not last forever," Gruman says. "They will be able to return to a life that's rich with possibility." ...

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Anthony Lewis' FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE Receives a Starred Review in Kirkus

From KIRKUS (Starred Review), October 15, 2007
Lewis, Anthony
FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE: Tales of the First Amendment

A superb history of the First Amendment and the body of law that has followed it.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and longtime Supreme Court observer Lewis (Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment, 1991, etc.), now retired from the New York Times, explains in the clearest of language how freedom of expression evolved in this country. Surprisingly, it was only in 1919 that a Supreme Court justice (Oliver Wendell Holmes) wrote that the First Amendment protected speech and publication, and that was in a dissent—not until 1931 did a majority on the Court begin enforcing the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. Drawing examples from many cases, Lewis demonstrates that interpretations of the First Amendment shifted over time as the Supreme Court, and the public, began to recognize that freedom of expression was one of America’s basic values. He considers the ways in which freedom can conflict with such other values as the right to privacy, protection from hate speech, the safeguarding of national security and the right to a fair trial (i.e., one uncompromised by prejudicial press coverage). He also explores the evolution of laws against libel here and in Great Britain and reports on the impact of the landmark 1964 case, New York Times v. Sullivan, which ended the press’s fear of seditious libel actions and promoted the investigative spirit that led to critical coverage of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Anecdotes abound in this lively, lucid history. Among other choice bits, readers will learn which Supreme Court Justice viewing films for their possibly pornographic content took a law clerk with him to tell him what was happening on the big screen.

Timely and important, a work that astonishes and delights as it informs.

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