Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in Library Journal

Library Journal, 1/15/2009

Sandweiss, Martha A. Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. Penguin Pr.: Penguin Group (USA). Feb. 2009. c.358p. index. ISBN 978-1-59420-200-1. $27.95. HIST

American West historian Sandweiss (American studies & history, Amherst Coll.; Print the Legend) utilizes archival, newspaper, and a panoply of digitized resources to analyze the personal and social complexity of the life of noted surveyor and geologist Clarence King (1842–1901). King, the scion of a storied white New England family, passed as the purported Pullman porter James Todd in order to espouse his African American common-law wife, Ada Copeland Todd King. Unlike previous King biographers (e.g., Robert Wilson, The Explorer King), Sandweiss treats in detail the challenges and dilemmas that King confronted in post-Civil War America, even in relatively tolerant New York City. Balancing scholarly exploration with readability, she focuses on King's 13-year secret (until he was on his deathbed, King kept the fact of his actual race from his wife), which produced acute psychological strains. History learned of it with a legal claim for his trust fund in 1933. Sandweiss demonstrates just how racial identity and inequality circumscribes behavior, adding both general background and individual perspectives on the conundrum of race in America. Her literary references add to a historical narrative that should catch the attention of both specialists and the reading public. A welcome choice for both academic and public libraries.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress

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Kaufman Field Guid Gets Lolz with Lolcats

more animals
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/01/02/funny-pictures-dat-one-comes-in-four-flavorz/

Christopher Lane's SHYNESS in Chicago Tribune

Psychiatric manual's update needs openness, not secrecy, critics say
Edition is being prepared with strict oversight, officials counter

By Ron Grossman | Tribune reporter
December 27, 2008

Whether revisions to the "bible" of mental illness should be carried out in secret might seem like an academic question.

But the issue carries real weight for parents desperate to address children's difficult behavior or people in distress over their mental state. It also speaks to citizens' concerns over news accounts of an overmedicated America and the troubling financial links between the pharmaceutical industry and some psychiatric researchers.

An update is under way for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, which defines the emotional problems for which doctors prescribe drugs and insurance companies pay the bills. Psychiatrists working on the new manual were required to sign a strict confidentiality agreement.

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Christopher Lane's SHYNESS reviewed in the New York Review of Books

Volume 56, Number 1 · January 15, 2009, The New York Review of Books
Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption
By Marcia Angell

Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial
by Alison Bass

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 260 pp., $24.95
Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
by Melody Petersen

Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $26.00
Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
by Christopher Lane

Yale University Press, 263 pp., $27.50; $18.00 (paper)

Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn't had to look very hard.

Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.

Legally, physicians may use drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose, but such use should be based on good published scientific evidence. That seems not to be the case here. Biederman's own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, "so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive."[1]

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Marni Sandweiss, author of PASSING STRANGE, Q&A in PW

Passing Strange
by Parul Sehgal -- Publishers Weekly, 12/22/2008

In Passing Strange (Reviews, Dec. 1), Sandweiss uncovers the double life of Clarence King, the renowned geologist who mapped the American West—and crossed color lines, passing as a black Pullman porter, James Todd, to marry Ada Copeland, a black nursemaid.

How did you come across this story?

I read Thurman Wilkins's spectacular biography of Clarence King in graduate school. It haunted me. Reading Philip Roth's wonderful The Human Stain got me thinking again, as did the Clinton scandal: Clinton messed up for 30 minutes and the story was spread around the world. King sustained a secret life for 13 years. So I sat down one day to see if there was anything I could do with the story. In five minutes I found the census document of King reporting to be black.

King's life reads like a Who's Who of the time: Henry Adams, Henry James, John Hayes—

James Weldon Johnson! Who would have thought? And Frederick Douglass. It's like six degrees of Clarence King. In the 19th century, he would have been on the cover of [the equivalent of] People magazine, but when the story came out in the 1930s, he had dropped out of public consciousness.

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Richard Ford's THE RACE CARD a Slate Best Book of '08

Pad Out Your Amazon Wish ListSlate picks the best books of 2008.
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2008, at 7:40 AM ET

Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor
Amid a flock of excellent legal books this year, two are really outstanding in my view. The first is Jane Mayer's The Dark Side. The second is my former law professor Richard Ford's The Race Card. Ford asks a simple question: How can claims of racism—in the courtroom, the media, and casual conversation—be so pervasive in America if so few of us are racists? His answers are provocative: Much of what we call racism is the result of racist decisions made decades ago with respect to housing, education, or urban planning. Cab drivers who refuse to pick up black men may be motivated by factors beyond racial hate—like not wanting to drop someone off in a bad part of town. The Race Card advances a debate that has been mired in reductive thinking for decades. You won't agree with Ford on everything. But you may find yourself thinking differently about everything. And that's my definition of a great book.

NYTs Book Blog: "My advice: buy Galbraith."

The Return of John Kenneth Galbraith
By Barry Gewen
Papercuts, December 17, 2008

When Milton Friedman’s stock is high, John Kenneth Galbraith’s is low, and vice versa. These past few months, as the federal government has injected billions of dollars into the economy, with many billions more to come, Friedman’s free-market ideas have taken a beating. My advice: buy Galbraith.

The downfall of Friedmanism, I would say, came on the day Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke marched into the Oval Office and convinced President Bush that the financial crisis was so severe the government had no choice but to intervene, and in a massive way. Markets could not be allowed to clear, Friedman-style, without bringing the roof down on everyone’s head. And once the Republican party’s Wall Street establishment came on board, almost the only Friedmanites left — at least until the failure of the auto industry bailout — were rural outliers like Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, crying in the wilderness about “socialism.” (There were, of course, other critics of the Bush bailouts, but they were populists, not Friedmanites, distressed that all that taxpayer money was going to the top, not the middle and bottom. That’s a different story.)

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