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. ♦

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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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Freada Kapor Klein in Newsday

Talking about workplace sexual harassment
Newsday October 15, 2007
BY PAT BURSON, pat.burson@newsday.com

If you've been at the water cooler recently, it probably came up: Sexual harassment is a hot topic at the moment. First there was the recent jury award to Anucha Browne Sanders over her treatment by New York Knicks coach Isiah Thomas and Madison Square Garden; then there was Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' resurrection of accusations Anita Hill made years ago during his confirmation hearings - rehashed in a new autobiography in which he again maintains his innocence and questions Hill's.

And it appears that MSG executives' troubles aren't over yet. Courtney Prince, a former captain of the Rangers City Skaters cheerleading squad has a sex-discrimination lawsuit pending against the Garden and two of its employees.

When such high-profile incidents get people buzzing, legal and workplace experts say it's also a good time for employees and employers to revisit and re-evaluate their efforts toward eradicating sexual harassment on the job - whether in offices or ditches, on front lines or assembly lines, in halls of learning or houses of faith - anywhere men and women work closely together.

The issue isn't new, but approaches to it continue to evolve. We asked experts who deal with the issue of sexual harassment as part of their work to offer their insights.

Here's what they had to say:

The workplace-harassment researcher and trainer: Sexual harassment policies often are written to protect the company, not to give practical guidance to workers at all levels, says Freada Kapor Klein, founder of the Level Playing Field Institute in San Francisco, who studies sexual harassment on the job and works with companies to create bias-free environments.

Here's her approach:

Toss out the one-size-fits-all, zero-tolerance sexual harassment policies that amount to little more than a list of do's and don'ts. They "make no sense when you're talking about grown-ups who spend eight, 10 and 12 hours a day in the workplace, who come from very different cultures, and who ought to be allowed some latitude to decide for themselves which is appropriate and inappropriate," says Klein, who offers more options for handling difficult situations at work in her new book, "Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest are Leaving the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay" (Jossey-Bass). It arrives in bookstores on Friday.

Create "people-friendly" policies that deal with real-life situations, including examples of "the gray area, where the workplace stops and starts," she says.

"For instance, if two people are walking to the train station after work, and they're talking about their weekend dates and somebody's offended by a comment that their co-worker makes, how do they handle it? Is this the business of the employer? Does it affect how they work together tomorrow?"

Establish safe and confidential places where employees can go informally to seek advice, ask a question or express a concern, as well as places they could go to file a formal complaint that would be investigated. "It's really letting the employee choose how to handle it," Klein says. "The choice should be the employee's."

Explain the differences between behaviors that are annoying, inappropriate and illegal. "There's a wide range of behavior, and it has a subjective part and objective part," she says. "The subjective piece means this is unwelcome to me. I don't like this joke. I don't like the way this person touches me. I don't want to hear about your dates. The objective part is, does it cross the line for most people? Would most people agree that this is out of bounds in a work environment?"

Urge employees to be clear about their boundaries and speak up respectfully if they feel their boundaries have been violated.

Let your employees know that you will enforce their boundaries. Klein says she thinks employees should be able to negotiate their own relationships with their colleagues without interference. But, she adds, if one employee already has warned another that he or she is doing something that's crossing the line and the person continues, then it's time for a higher-up to step in.

"When you say, 'Please don't touch me again,' then I understand that I'm risking getting in trouble when I persist because management has made it clear" that everyone's boundaries will be protected.

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Rachel Herz, Author of the Scent of Desire on Diane Rehm

11:00am, Diane Rehm

Of all our senses, the sense of smell is most closely tied to mental health and happiness. It was the first of our senses to evolve, yet it often takes a cultural backseat to sight and sound. An expert on smell talks about the psychology, biology and sociology of our olfactory sense.

For transcripts or more on this show please click here.

Freada Kapor Klein's Giving Notice Mentioned in the NYT Fashion & Style Section

Boss’s Memo: Go Ahead, Date (With My Blessing)
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
New York Times, October 11, 2007

...Attempts to regulate office relationships are not just meant to avoid sexual harassment claims. Romance among colleagues can lead to unfair and unethical treatment, and to a poisonous atmosphere that affects many others. In a book to be published later this month, “Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay” (Jossey-Bass), Freada Kapor Klein explains how unproductive, even hostile, a work environment can be if there is a culture of crudeness or rampant extramarital affairs, especially those that cross lines of power and authority.

Yet Ms. Kapor Klein, the founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, a nonprofit organization that promotes fairness in the workplace and in society, said that forbidding office dating, even between superiors and subordinates, is no solution. “The real issue is not that they’re sleeping with each other,” she said. “The real issue is that their emotional attachment to each other may get in the way of their business judgment.”

She advises companies to write policies stating that workers will not be fired for dating, but can be fired for not disclosing and mitigating it. If romances are outlawed, “you merely drive that situation underground,” she said. “It’s the dishonesty that poisons the work environment, not the relationship.”

Full disclosure: Ms. Kapor Klein is married to her former chief executive, Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the software application. Ms. Kapor Klein said she and Mr. Kapor did not begin dating until more than a decade after they met at the office (she was the director of organizational development and training).

“He indicated that if he weren’t married I was somebody he would be interested in,” Ms. Kapor Klein said. “I took that as a world-class compliment. Not harassing. Not coercive. And that was the end of it for 12 years.”

Today they are husband and wife. So is the woman to whom blue-chip companies turn for policy advice in favor of office love?

“Keep in mind the current success rate of marriage is about 50-50,” Ms. Kapor Klein said. “Just thinking purely in terms of probability, what do you think the odds are of an office romance working out? Has to be less than 50-50. So before you rush ahead, think about how it’s going to feel to sit in this weekly staff meeting with somebody who you had a miserable breakup with and who you actually wish didn’t exist on the planet. Think about it. And then take a reasonable risk.”

For the beginning of the article, please click here.

Lou Ureneck's Backcast in the Boston Globe

An Alaskan fishing trip provides bond for estranged father and son

By David Mehegan
Boston Globe, October 9, 2007

BELCHERTOWN - On a mild September morning on the Swift River, where it flows out of the Quabbin Reservoir, Lou Ureneck wades and casts a No. 14 grasshopper fly upstream. A 16-inch rainbow trout hurtles up and grabs it, dancing atop the bright water until it is brought to hand and released.

With its poetic fineness and almost mathematical detail, fly-fishing has a gestural language which links aficionados on a stream, even in silence. It's that language that Ureneck hoped would help reverse a widening gulf between himself and a teenage son. The hope played out in an eventful fishing trip on Alaska's lonely Kanektok River in 2000. The father-son link was reknit, if not right away, and not necessarily in the way Ureneck imagined. The story is told in his new book, "Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska." More than a fish story, it's an autobiography, and at the center are two broken families.

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Anthony T. Kronman's Education's End Reviewed in San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Review: Anthony T. Kronman's 'Education's End'
By Bob Blaisdell

Education's End
Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life
By Anthony T. Kronman
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS; 308 PAGES; $27.50

Anthony T. Kronman believes that in the '60s, just after he got out of law school, American liberal arts professors lost their nerve.

Back in the day, teachers engaged their undergraduates in serious classroom discussion about the meaning of life. They read the classics and talked about the timeless matters of philosophy. Young people experienced a variety of thought that, according to Kronman, over the past 40 years, academic fads and the institutionalization of multiculturalism cannot or will not communicate.

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Richard Ford's The Race Card Reviewed in Publisher's Weekly

Publishers Weekly, October 8, 2007
The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse
Richard Thompson Ford. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25 (352p) ISBN 978-0-374-24575-7

Today's race relations,” law professor Ford demonstrates, “are more complex and contradictory than those of the unambiguously white supremacist past.” In this journey through a political minefield, he examines dubious charges of racism and other kinds of bias, while acknowledging that exaggerated claims can piggyback on real examples of victimization. But the author's tenor is often more eye-catching than eye-opening. He revisits Tawana Brawley, Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Hurricane Katrina, along with Oprah's Hermès problem, Jay-Z's with champagne and Danny Glover's with New York City cabdrivers. Yet at its core, this book raises probing questions about the extent to which “the extraordinary social and legal condemnation of racism and other social prejudices encourages people to recast what are basically run-of-the-mill social conflicts as cases of bigotry.” By analogy, he addresses issues concerning animal liberation, gay marriage, “appearance discrimination,” “sex harassment law” and multiculturalism. In delineating the differences between formal discrimination, discriminatory intent and discriminatory effects, Ford also reviews thorny legal cases involving, for example, McDonnell Douglas and Price Waterhouse. Readers all along the political spectrum will find much to please, annoy and provoke thought about the thin “line between invidious discrimination and plan old unfairness.” (Feb.)

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Rachel Herz Scent of Desire on Reuters

Smells can inspire, arouse -- and drive you mad
By Belinda Goldsmith
Reuters, Monday Oct 8, 2007 8:22am EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven. Fresh cut grass. Your spouse's natural body odor. Smells can invoke memories, sexually arouse people, or even drive you mad.

Psychology professor Rachel Herz from Brown University in Rhode Island has spent 17 years studying the human sense of smell, finding it is the most emotionally evocative sense and the one most closely tied to mental health and happiness.

In a new book, "The Scent of Desire," she argues Michael Hutchence, frontman of Australian rock band INXS, may have been driven into a deep depression after losing his sense of smell in an accident which may have contributed to his 1997 suicide.

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Anthony Kronman in Today's WSJ

Hitting the Books Without Having a Clue
By ROBERT MESSENGER
From October 4, 2007 Wall Street Journal

In the late 1930s, the Oxford classicist Hugh Last organized the defeat of a measure to make anthropology a degree-subject at the university. "An acquaintance with the habits of savages," he said, "is not an education." Behind Last's quip was a claim that anthropology is in no way formative knowledge of the kind that students require.

Exactly what students require -- what "an education" really entails -- is the subject of "Education's End," an impassioned defense of the study of the humanities by Anthony Kronman, a professor at Yale and formerly dean of its law school. "One cannot live a meaningful life," Mr. Kronman writes, "unless there is something one is prepared to give it up for. People's lives are therefore meaningful in proportion to their acknowledgment that there is something more important than the lives they are leading: something worth caring about in an ultimate way. The question, of course, is what that something is or ought to be."

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