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.