Library Journal Interview with Rachel Herz

From Library Journal, September 25th
By Mary Ann Hughes

Proustian scholars, foodies, and popular psychology fiends alike would be wise to seek out Rachel Herz’s eminently readable The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (October, Morrow). Drawing on the latest research, the visiting professor to Brown University breaks down the powerful connection between our nose and emotions—one that can influence our choice in a signature scent and romantic partners. Longtime LJ reviewer Mary Ann Hughes spoke to Herz to get to the bottom of our olfactory system.

LJ: The title of your book sounds like a romance novel. Why did you choose it?

Smell is the sense that is most closely linked to our emotions, our passions. Scents themselves also can trigger extremely potent emotional associations and states. Scents are also very important in sexual attraction. In sum, our sense of smell is the sense of desire, and scents themselves induce desire. I wanted to capture those concepts and, of course, a sexy title helps to turn heads.

For the rest of the interview, please click here.

Strothman Agency Author David Brion Davis Wins A Connecticut Book Award

David Brion Davis' Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World won the 2007 Connecticut Book Award for Nonfiction.

For more about the book awards as well as a list of other winners, please click here.

Christopher Lane's OpED on Shyness in 9/21 NYT

Shy on Drugs
By CHRISTOPHER LANE
New York Times, OpEd September 21, 2007

FEW children relish the start of a new school year. Most yearn for summer to continue and greet the onset of classes with groans or even dread. But among those who take the longest to adapt and thrive, psychiatrists say, are children trapped in a pathological condition. They are so acutely shy that they are said to suffer “social anxiety disorder” — an affliction of children and adolescents that, the clinicians argue, is spreading.

It may seem baffling, even bizarre, that ordinary shyness could assume the dimension of a mental disease. But if a youngster is reserved, the odds are high that a psychiatrist will diagnose social anxiety disorder and recommend treatment.

For the rest of the article, please click here.

Christopher Lane's Shyness Reviewed in Scientific American Magazine

Scientific American Magazine;
Reviews; October 2007;
by Michelle Press; 1 Page(s)

SHYNESS: HOW NORMAL BEHAVIOR BECAME A SICKNESS
by Christopher Lane. Yale University Press, 2007

Would Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson be given drugs today? In the 1980s a small group of leading psychiatrists revised the profession's diagnostic manual, called the DSM for short, adding social anxiety disorder--aka shyness--and dozens of other new conditions. Christopher Lane, Miller Research Professor at Northwestern University, uses previously secret documents, many from the American Psychiatric Association archives, to support his argument that these decisions were marked by carelessness, pervasive influence from the pharmaceutical industry, academic politics and personal ambition. Lane shows how drug companies seized on the newly minted disorders to sell millions of dollars' worth of psychotropic drugs. Some have dangerous side effects; some were already developed-treatments looking for a disease. The next revision of the DSM is already under way, and Lane warns that without drastic reform many more common behaviors--excessive shopping, poorly controlled anger, defiance--can become pathologies for which drugs are already on tap.

For the rest of the article, please click here.

David Blight's A Slave No More Receives a Starred Review in Kirkus

From the September 15 Issue of Kirkus Reviews


[starred] Blight, David W.

A SLAVE NO MORE: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation

Two newly discovered narratives of slaves who escaped to freedom during the Civil War.

Blight (American History/Yale; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 2001, etc.) tells the stories of John Washington and Wallace Turnage, whose manuscripts came to him after being preserved by members of their families. The two had little in common beyond their experiences as slaves and their eventual flights to Union lines where they were granted their liberty. Washington, light-skinned enough to pass for white when a boy, was born in northern Virginia in 1838. He took advantage of the arrival of federal troops in the vicinity of Fredericksburg, where he worked largely as a house servant, to escape. Turnage, born in Snow Hill, N.C., was sold to a cotton plantation in Alabama, where he worked under much harsher conditions than Washington. He made four unsuccessful attempts to escape before reaching Union lines near Mobile, then under siege by the U.S. Navy. Blight summarizes their stories, adding commentary on the time period and the institution of slavery as both men experienced it, making comparisons to other well-known slave narratives, such as that of Frederick Douglass. He then devotes a chapter to each of their post-slavery lives. The men spent their postwar lives in the North—Washington in the nation’s capital, where he worked as a sign painter, Turnage in New Jersey and New York City, where he worked as a waiter and janitor—and both lived into the World War I era. Toward the end of the book, Blight reproduces the two men’s narratives of their experiences as slaves—by far the most interesting section. Washington is the more polished writer, with a more conventional structure to his narrative. Turnage, however, went through a far more harrowing experience, both in his treatment by overseers and in his several breaks for freedom. Both are well worth reading.

A powerful, welcome addition to the Civil War library. (Agent: Wendy Strothman/Strothman Agency, LLC)

Essay by Ian Shapiro on Nieman Watchdog

On Nieman Watchdog: Questions the Press Should Ask

Containment as a basis for national security
COMMENTARY | September 04, 2007

Yale scholar and author Ian Shapiro proposes that containment, the strategy designed by George F. Kennan in the 1940s to deal with the Soviet Union, be implemented today to cope with the new challenges of terrorism. He sees it as a way for the U.S. to establish a rational, respected, effective foreign policy.

By Ian Shapiro

A huge problem confronting the U.S. in Iraq is the perception that we lack the will to stay the course. If enough people believe that it’s only a matter of time before we pack up and leave, this has a knock-on effect in the present. Insurgents have every incentive to wait us out, and, at home, the addition of scores of new American fatalities each month seems all the more tragically pointless.

This difficulty is compounded by our need to depend on allies whose own politics might make them just as fickle. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is widely known to be cooler than was Tony Blair about his country’s involvement in Iraq. Even as Downing Street was denying that Brown’s July visit to Camp David involved unveiling plans for a British withdrawal, The Times of London reported that one of his aides was sounding Washington out “on the possibility of an early British military withdrawal” and the departure from Basra that has since taken place. If the other side believes you are going to fold, why won’t they up the ante?

For the rest of the essay, please click here.