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.

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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.