Thursday, January 31, 2008

Christopher Lane's SHYNESS in New England Journal of Medicine


New England Journal of Medicine, Book Review, Volume 358:539-540, January 31, 2008, Number 5

Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
By Christopher Lane. 263 pp., illustrated. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2007. $27.50. ISBN 978-0-300-12446-0.


This well-written book is a thoughtful examination of shyness and its relation to psychopathology. It reminds me of earlier books in this area, including Richard McNally's Panic Disorder: A Critical Analysis (New York: Guilford Press, 1994) and Isaac Marks's Fears, Phobias, and Rituals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). In fact, Marks receives an official acknowledgment in Christopher Lane's book. Although Lane claims to tackle mainly the topic of shyness and mental health, he also sheds light on recent developments in the official classification and nature of the field of anxiety disorders, dating back to the landmark changes that were . . .

For the rest of this article, click here.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES Book Trailer



Click Here for the Promotional Book Trailer For HIGH CRIMES

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN Reviewed in Publisher's Weekly


Fiction Reviews: Week of 1/28/2008
-- Publishers Weekly, 1/28/2008

The Book of Getting Even
Benjamin Taylor. Steerforth, $23.95 (176p) ISBN 978-1-58642-143-4


In this delightful, character-driven coming-of-age novel, Gabriel Geismar grows up in mid–20th-century New Orleans as the only son of a rabbi, maturing into a brilliant, homosexual mathematician who is out of sync with his father's values. At Swarthmore in 1970, Gabriel meets the twins Daniel and Marghie Hundert, the children of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Gregor Hundert, one of the so-called Hungarian Eight who emigrated to America and worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the bomb. Fascinated by the stately, Old World professor and his kindly wife, Lilo, and deeply attached to Marghie, a cinema-obsessed vegetarian, and to Daniel, an angry counterculture figure, Gabriel spends the summer with the family at their Wisconsin retreat, which yields cherished conversation and understanding. As Gabriel departs to study astrophysics at the University of Chicago, the tempo of Daniel's activism builds, and Marghie begins running a movie house. When the once great professor sinks into senile dementia, Lilo makes a necessary but terrible decision for them all. The editor of Saul Bellow's forthcoming letters, Taylor turns in a smart, humane look at what Gabriel calls the era's “intergenerational rancor.” (May)


For other reviews in this issue, click here.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES in The Courant


Height Of Adventure, Depths Of Despair
Courant's Kodas Tells Of Shattered Dreams On Mount Everest
By STEVE WEINBERG
Special to The Courant, January 27, 2008


Everest. The name of the mountain in the Himalaya range, partly in China, partly in Tibet, suggests exotic travel — human adventure dependent upon nearly unimaginable physical conditioning.

But those who read "High Crimes," Michael Kodas' exposé of contemporary climbing, will probably never again associate the mountain with the word "exotic." More likely, they will forever associate it with nearly unimaginable — and sometimes fatal — greed. (The book will be in stores Feb. 5.)

Climbing to the summit of Everest, the highest in the world, has become a status symbol. As a result, wealthy, middle-class and sometimes far less-well-off people travel to Everest, determined to buy or steal their way if they cannot reach the summit honestly. Some status seekers are experienced climbers, but, according to Kodas, many are not. They understand at some level that reaching the summit is physically and psychologically taxing. But they are ignorant of how much can go wrong, and so quickly that people die.

Kodas is a photographer for The Courant. When he and his wife, Carolyn Moreau, then a Courant reporter, traveled to Everest four years ago, he was not planning to write a relentless exposé. Kodas, who had climbed mountains elsewhere, expected a positive experience culminating in a photograph of himself at the summit, looking down from nearly 30,000 feet above sea level.

Their unexpectedly grim adventure started innocently in their Hartford neighborhood during 2003. Kodas happened to spot some neighbors, George Dijmarescu, a Romanian American adventurer who had climbed Everest nine times, and his wife, Lhakpa Sherpa, who had climbed the mountain five times, pushing their 1-year-old daughter in a stroller. During a conversation, Kodas learned his neighbors wanted to lead an Everest expedition for Connecticut residents willing to pay guides who would lead them to the summit.


For the rest of the article and images, click here.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Judge Julian Houston, author of NEW BOY, in Boston Phoenix


Judging Chris Matthews
Julian Houston on race in Boston


By NEELY STEINBERG
January 23, 2008, The Phoenix


Anyone meeting Julian Houston for the first time might feel intimidated. Résumé aside, at 6-3, the former associate justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court is a towering presence. His eyes bulge forth, confidently, boldly, like a bullfrog’s, and won’t do much to put you at ease. But when you meet him, his eyes and his stature soften to reveal a kind and gentle man. Now retired from the bench, Houston spends his time writing fiction at his home in Brookline, but it is his real-life back story that is the stuff of novels. While attending Boston University in 1962, Houston became an integral part of the local civil-rights movement. At the end of his freshman year, he then took a leave of absence to work for the civil-rights cause in Harlem, organizing rent strikes and tutoring programs.

In 2005, Houston published his first and only novel, the critically acclaimed New Boy, just out in paperback. The story, set in the late 1950s, follows a young African-American Virginian, Rob Garrett, as he crosses the racial divide to attend an all-white boarding school in Connecticut. It’s a case of art imitating life: Houston attended the Hotchkiss School, in Lakeville, under similar circumstances. (There’s a sequel in the works about how Rob decides to withdraw from Yale after his freshman year to work for civil rights in Alabama — sound familiar?) I had the good fortune of catching up with Houston a few days before his January 16 Beacon Hill book reading (sponsored by the National Park Service), to pick his brain about racism in America today.

Asked about Chris Matthews’s recent remarks anathematizing Boston as an exceedingly — though disguisedly — racist city (“It may not be ‘I think I’m better than you,’ but it might be ‘I don’t want to live next door to you.’ ”), Houston censured the leftie pundit.

“[His comments] were another attempt by a representative of the media to stir up a controversy with stale information. What does he base this opinion on? Events that took place 30 years ago? The fact of the matter is that Boston has undergone enormous changes since the time that such a charge would have stuck.” (Matthews, it should be noted, lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland — you do the geographical math.)

So, is Boston a racist city?

“No more so than any other city in the country, and that includes New England cities,” opined Houston. “It should be obvious, even to Chris Matthews, that things have changed. Any number of cities in the North, as well as the South, have black mayors, sizable black representation in city councils and state legislatures, as well as in the administration of school systems and other key positions in urban government. That is not to say that racism has been eliminated, but, for the most part, state-sponsored racism has.”

Houston also weighed in on the presidential election. “I think America is ready for anyone who is honest and compassionate. . . . Race isn’t an issue.” Though he declined to say for whom he’d be voting, he did voice his uncertainty over Barack Obama’s candidacy. “I felt he was vulnerable on the issue of experience, and I still feel that way.”


For the article, click here.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Lou Ureneck's BACKCAST in Washington Post


Skimming the Surface of Troubled Waters
By Michael Blumenthal,

Washington Post, Thursday, January 17, 2008; Page C11

BACKCAST: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska

By Lou Ureneck
St. Martin's. 286 pp. $24.95

Many a husband, this reviewer included, vows never to divorce after having children. And many a father who breaks that vow has sought to heal the wounds inflicted on his children. One of those concerned fathers is Lou Ureneck. Following his divorce, he attempted to mend fatherhood's torn fabric by taking his 18-year-old son, Adam, on a fly-fishing trip to Alaska's Kanektok River.

His new book, "Backcast," which describes that experience, invites comparison with two American classics: Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It," a magical novella that evokes nature's miracles and its human counterparts while relying heavily on its author's experiences as a fly fisherman; and Robert Pirsig's equally unforgettable "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," a work of nonfiction that, under the guise of describing a 17-day motorcycle journey across the United States by an unnamed father and his 9-year-old son, yields a profound philosophical meditation on the idea of quality.

Yet, in the end, every book must stand or fall on its own; and, in places at least -- particularly when it comes to describing the natural world -- Ureneck seems up to the task. Here he is, for example, describing Mount Oratia's 4,700-foot rise over Alaska's Kagati Lake: "It was snow covered. The lake itself is shaped like a set of lungs, two deep-blue lobes separated by a long sternum of purple and green tundra and low silver-green bushes. The sternum ascends quickly on its easterly, or upstream, end into a mountain, Ata-ai-ach, and then descends to rise up again into a higher and unnamed mountain."




For the rest of the article, click here.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Anthony Lewis' FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE on Front Page of NYT Book Review



Say What You Will
By JEFFREY ROSEN
New York Times Sunday Book Review, January 13, 2008

FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE
A Biography of the First Amendment.
By Anthony Lewis.
221 pp. Basic Books. $25.


Throughout his long career as an author and a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, Anthony Lewis has been one of the most inspiring advocates of a heroic view of the American judiciary. Each year I read aloud to my criminal procedure students the final paragraphs of “Gideon’s Trumpet,” Lewis’s definitive account of the 1963 Supreme Court case that recognized a constitutional right to court-appointed counsel. They never fail to bring a lump to the throat — at least to mine. In his new book, “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate,” Lewis offers a similarly heroic account of how courageous judges in the 20th century created the modern First Amendment by prohibiting the government from banning offensive speech, except to prevent a threat of serious and imminent harm. “Many of the great advances in the quality — the decency — of American society were initiated by judges,” he writes. “The truth is that bold judicial decisions have made the country what it is.”

It’s easy to see why Lewis came to view judges as brave protectors of First Amendment rights: he covered the Supreme Court during the Warren era, when the modern First Amendment took shape, and he recalls Justice Felix Frankfurter’s showing him an eloquent 1929 dissent by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that defended the free speech rights of Quakers and pacifists and that inspired the title of this book. “When I came to the final paragraph,” Lewis says, “I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.” But this is not a comprehensive narrative history of the development of the modern First Amendment; Lewis already provided that in his 1991 book, “Make No Law.” Instead, it is a passionate if discursive essay that ranges across a variety of free speech controversies — from sedition and obscenity to hate speech and secret wiretapping. This may seem like winner’s history, but the victories Lewis celebrates remain controversial. There are persistent voices, in Europe and America, that continue to argue for suppressing hate speech on university campuses, for example; Lewis rightly applauds the fact that American courts have rejected their arguments.

Still, the most surprising and provocative occasions are those when Lewis himself departs from civil libertarian free speech orthodoxy. He is not, it turns out, a fan of an unqualified federal shield law that would protect reporters from the obligation to reveal their anonymous sources in criminal cases. The press “is not always the good guy,” he writes, citing its support for the unjust prosecution of the atomic scientist Wen Ho Lee, and he praises judges who balance the costs and benefits of protecting anonymous sources in each case. He criticizes the Supreme Court for extending its most stringent protections in libel suits not only to government officials but also to movie stars and other temporary celebrities. He would allow citizens to recover damages for certain invasions of privacy when editors and reporters are “negligent in making their mistakes, rather than what is harder to prove,” when “their falsification was deliberate or reckless.” And, in the wake of the London bombings of July 2005, he would allow the prosecution of “speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience some of whose members are ready to act on the urging” — without the need to prove a risk of imminent danger, as current United States law requires.

All of Lewis’s proposals reflect his faith that the judiciary is well equipped to balance the value of free speech against other values (like privacy and national security) in a thoughtful and independent way. But is he too optimistic? There is a competing, decidedly less heroic account of First Amendment history, which holds that judges have always tended to reflect the public’s prejudices about unpopular speakers, and that most advances for free speech have been initiated not by judges, as Lewis argues, but by political activism. It was abolitionists, in the 1830s, who first argued that Southern states shouldn’t be able to ban antislavery tracts because of the remote possibility they might provoke an insurrection; the Supreme Court took another 130 years to enshrine the underlying principle into law. Similarly, the court began to protect political dissidents like Communists and Ku Klux Klan members in the late 1960s, not in the 1920s and 1950s — that is, only when they were no longer perceived as a serious threat by national majorities.

Lewis’s faith in judges also presumes that free speech controversies will take the same form in the future as they have in the past — namely, as legal battles between an overreaching government and the institutional press, with the judiciary as a neutral arbiter. But is this really likely? The rise of new technologies suggests that the free speech battles of the future may instead pit telecom corporations against private speakers, leaving judges on the sidelines. Consider Verizon’s recent decision to block abortion rights text messages by Naral Pro-Choice America from its mobile networks. (Under pressure, Verizon rescinded the decision but stood by its position that it can decide which messages to transmit.) As several scholars have argued, the solution to this problem of corporate censorship — open-access rules of “net neutrality” that would require telecom operators to make their services available to all speakers on equal terms — is in the hands of Congress and the Federal Communications Commission rather than the courts. No matter how heroic our judges, they’re not well positioned to make regulatory policy.


For the rest of the review, please click here.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Susan Fox Rogers, editor of Antarctica: Life on the Ice, Q and A on World Hum


Susan Fox Rogers: Antarctica for ‘Dreamers and Readers’

Days after the ice claimed a cruise ship, Jim Benning asks the editor of a new Travelers’ Tales story collection about the magnetic pull of the end of the earth.
From WorldHum.com


As a child, Susan Fox Rogers read stories about Antarctica explorers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott that sparked her imagination. In 2004-05, she spent six weeks at McMurdo Station as part of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. She went there with plans to edit a story collection that included contributions from professional writers and others who work there. The result is the new Travelers’ Tales anthology, Antarctica: Life on the Ice. It’s the 11th story collection she has edited. I dialed her up this week at her office in the Hudson River Valley—she teaches creative writing at Bard College—to ask her about the book and the allure of Antarctica.

World Hum: First off, what’d you make of the cruise ship wreck over the weekend?

Susan Fox Rogers: There are a couple of things that are really fantastic about it. Here’s this ship built specifically to go into dangerous terrain, icy waters. None of the reports say the ship was structurally weak. I don’t know much about boats but I know the technology of tracking what’s below a ship is powerful and accurate. You know what’s around you. The fact that this happened shows that the variables involved in traveling in this terrain are enormous.

And the trip was called “Spirit of Shackleton.” They got what they were looking for. These passengers must have been terrified. They didn’t know they were going to be rescued when they climbed into these boats. Shackleton’s men kept their spirits up by singing. And apparently, these cruise passengers were telling jokes to keep their spirits up. Psychology is a huge part of one’s survival there.


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

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Anthony Lewis' FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE in The Christian Science Monitor


A balance between free speech and fear
Anthony Lewis follows the history of the First Amendment protections.

By Chuck Leddy
The Christian Science Monitor, January 8, 2008 edition

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis is among the great American journalists of the past half century. His coverage of legal issues for The New York Times, where he was a columnist for 32 years, along with his best­selling books (including "Gideon's Trumpet"), have made him one of the most popular commentators on American law.

In his wonderfully accessible and passionate new book, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate, Lewis looks at the long history of free expression in the United States. As the author notes again and again, that history has been a troubled one. American presidents, from John Adams to George W. Bush, have reacted to crisis and fear with repressive measures that have shut off dissent and quelled the open expression of unpopular opinions.

Lewis begins with the text of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press...." He examines the purpose of these words, and repeatedly cites James Madison, the father of the Constitution, who believed that a free press and an informed, vocal public would help keep governmental power in check. This "Madisonian" ideal of holding government accountable for its actions, writes Lewis, "tells us why Americans should scent danger when a government tries to stop a newspaper from disclosing the origins of an unpopular war ... or accuses a newspaper of endangering national security by disclosing secret and illegal wiretapping."

Without an open debate where unpopular ideas can be expressed, Lewis notes, the public and press simply become cheerleaders for the government: if, as the fairy tale goes, the emperor has no clothes, there will be nobody willing to point out this inconvenient truth. Indeed, Lewis blasts the press for submissiveness after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "[T]o criticize the president in the atmosphere of [post 9/11] fear could seem unpatriotic," writes Lewis, but without the press effectively fulfilling its watchdog function, the public risked being "sold" a war in Iraq based on faulty premises.


For the rest of the article, click here.

Marlene Zuk Quoted in New York Times


Tiny Specks of Misery, Both Vile and Useful

By NATALIE ANGIER
New York Times, January 8, 2008

...It’s easy to hate viruses for those freeloading schemes: nice trick, forcing me to throw up just so you can get out and mingle. How about if I name an entire class of computer problems after you? Yet viruses can seem almost tragic. Many strains, it turns out, are surprisingly delicate.

“Microbes like the anthrax bacterium can remain dormant in the soil for years” and still retain their power to kill, said Marlene Zuk, author of “Riddled With Life” and a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside. “But viruses are really fragile, and they can’t survive outside their host for very long.” A few hours, maybe a couple of days left unclaimed on a cup or keyboard, and the average viral spore falls apart.

And they are so nakedly needy. They depend on our cells to manufacture every detail of their offspring, to print up new copies of the core instruction booklets, to fabricate the capsid jackets and to deliver those geometrically tidy newborn virions to fresh host shores. Through us, viruses can transcend mere chemistry and lay claim to biology. Many scientists view viruses, with their lack of autonomous means of metabolism or reproduction, as straddling the border between life and nonlife. But if there is ever a case to be made for the liveliness of viruses, it is when they are replicating and mutating and evolving inside us.


For the rest of the article, click here.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Lou Ureneck's BACKCAST in the Associated Press


River journey takes divorced dad and son farther than Alaska

By Jerry Harkavy ,
Associated Press, January 2nd, 2008


PORTLAND - When newspaper editor Lou Ureneck took his teenage son Adam on a 110-mile river journey through the Alaskan wilderness in August 2000, he had more in mind than observing wildlife and catching salmon and Arctic char.

The fishing trip was Ureneck's desperate attempt to reconnect with his son just before Adam went off to college, an effort to ensure that the angry and alienated youngster, who blamed his father for his parents' bitter divorce, would remain a part of his life.

As the two traveled by raft down the Kanektok River to the sea, a trip fraught with dangerous episodes, nasty weather and repressed emotions that sprung to the surface, Ureneck jotted down his thoughts and observations in a journal. Three years later, he decided to write about the trip and realized there was a lot more to the story than he had anticipated.

"As the narrative unfolded, there was this kind of undertow that pulled me back to my own childhood, and it eventually became a book really about paternity, about fatherhood. These two different journeys - the journey down the river and the journey growing up as a boy, as a fisherman, without a father," Ureneck, 57, said in an interview. By examining his past, he was better able to come to terms with it.

His critically acclaimed memoir, "Backcast," weaves the 10-day father-and-son adventure in southwestern Alaska with Ureneck's own back story, beginning with a chaotic upbringing in New Jersey in which his father walked out when he was 7 and disappeared from his life. The family was strapped for money and Ureneck remembers having to move 17 times during childhood, sometimes skipping out on the rent.

As he grew to manhood, Ureneck yearned for a normal life, promising himself that he would keep his family intact. He vowed to never subject his two children to the kind of grief he endured when his father, and later his alcoholic stepfather whom he truly loved, were lost to him because of divorce.

Early on, he found solace in fly fishing. His book draws its title from fishing - when a line is thrown back in order to propel it forward. When the backcast is right, the forward cast is more likely to be on target.


For the rest of the article, please click here.