An excellent, playful takedown of the DSM5 in The Book of Woe

From The Week of May 27, 2013 Compared to the talents and the weapons claimed by the great diversity of life on Earth, humans are an unremarkable species. We cannot hide ourselves in plain sight nor poison our enemies with venom. We cannot glide through the skies nor survive at the bottom of the oceans. But what we lack in tusks and gills, wings and exoskeletons we make up for with the power to think, an ability that has given rise not just to dreams and language, science and culture, but the only advanced civilization to have ever graced our planet. Our minds are remarkable machines that evolution has shaped into tools that we will use to rise beyond our base genetics, our root circumstances, and take to the stars. But for all its glory and its plasticity, the human mind is not without its flaws. For while it has enabled some to make discoveries that have re-imagined our world and our universe, it has also steered some into the pits of hell, condemning them to lives of madness and confusion, obsession and disassociation from which it is difficult to recover. And it has encouraged yet others to study these malformed minds to both glean knowledge of their illnesses and to aid in their healing. But just how successful has that effort been to catalogue and heal the array of human mental afflictions? Gary Greenberg explains in his fascinating polemic. The diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) is the psychiatrist's handbook. An oft-revised classification of mental illnesses, it is an encyclopedia of disorders that range from the disassociative to the obsessive. Though largely confined to the psychiatric community, the alphabet soup of its terminology, BP, OCD, BPD, has spilled over into mainstream culture, causing some to prematurely diagnose themselves with its theatre of mental horrors while motivating others to rebel against its labels, rejecting them as nonsense. Between, it has given rise to an eruption of proscriptive drug use unimaginable fifty years ago, a result that none of its authors could have predicted. The DSM has undoubtedly been beneficial to some. Its classifications, assembled from thousands of studies, have helped clinicians accurately recognize and properly treat mental illness in their patients. However, the DSM is simultaneously, and unavoidably, the work of men and women who cannot escape the biases of their culture. Thus, over the years, "afflictions" such as homosexuality have been included in its pages, proscriptions offered for its curation. These incidents damage the Manual's credibility. For if illnesses can so easily slip in and out of its pages, then what truly is mental illness? Can we ever know? The result of both a career as a clinician and the most recent and controversial revision of the DSM, The Book of Woe is an excellent and utterly unforgiving examination of the DSM: its history, its implementation and its architects. Though Mr. Greenberg pays particular interest to the pointed criticisms of the DSM5 by Allen Frances, the author of the previous version, this exercise in mud-slinging is merely an entertaining and clarifying lens through which to view the ways in which the DSM has impacted psychiatrists, their patients and the wider culture. In this, Mr. Greenberg is clinical in his ruthlessness, raising awareness of the numerous ways in which the DSM's various revisions have been exploited by doctors and pharmaceutical firms to create highly profitable drugs of dubious effectiveness at the expense of patients and their concerned families. This work is hardly the first to raise such concerns, but they are handled here with both care and passion. Though much of The Book of Woe's critiques of the DSM5 will be of little interest to non-psychiatrists, Mr. Greenberg is effective in taking the reader into the anatomy of a diagnosis, not only revealing how thin the line is between mental health and mental illness, as defined by the DSM, but the ways in which such diagnoses offer hope to bewildered families seeking answers. The author poignantly captures just how desperate some people are to get help, help that, at times, the DSM actually hinders instead of aids. The Book of Woe only re-enforces the critical importance of being one's own best advocate, of questioning everything as a means to getting the proper diagnosis, a task made all the more difficult when one's mind is clouded by illness. The Book of Woe is certainly not without its flaws. Mr. Greenberg barely even attempts to be objective about the DSM5, featuring here its critics far more than its promoters. Moreover, he has chosen to prominently focus on the bumps in the road to the DSM5's publication, making it seem as though the book is a nonsensical result of bureaucratic bumbling. His desire to emphasize these flaws gives what would appear to be a distorted view of the DSM5's quality. However, even in this, Mr. Greenberg's work serves a purpose, chiefly, to reveal the degree to which the APA has deployed all the typical and despicable tools of a bureaucracy on the defensive to fend off criticisms and discredit its criticizers, a reality that leaves the APA looking both disorganized and greedy. For those interested in the history of the DSM, The Book of Woe is a wonderful read, full of colorful characters and powerful minds. But for those looking for a good catfight between deeply interested parties, looking to preserve both fame and fortune, look no further. (4/5 Stars)

How Pleasure Works tells us virtually nothing about...wait for it...pleasure

From The Week of march 4, 2013
Of the various fundamental motivations that stir us to action, few are as essential and as wide-ranging as pleasure. For it is this desire to experience joy and reward, happiness and satisfaction, that compels us to achieve our dreams. Without it, life would be a dreary exercise, a plodding monotony that would culminate in nothing more elevating than the completion of ones tasks. It is pleasure that activates our passions and drives our needs. It is pleasure, and its pursuit, that make us more than what we are. And this is a truth championed in Mr. Bloom's brief and troubled exploration.

From food to sex, from competition to gender, pleasure has captured the human mind for thousands of years. It enlivens our days and makes of our nights realms of anticipation and glee into which we all wish to plunge. But what is the essence of pleasure? And how does it manifest? Mr. Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University, draws upon the theory of Essentialism to answer these basic questions. From the whys that underpin why people will pay more for a celebrity's dirty clothes than for their clean ones to why boys and girls distinguish themselves before the broader culture sorts them out, he argues that human pleasure is derived from our understanding of the world, both in its categorization and in its structure, and that everything from why we drink bottled water to why we believe in spiritualism can be traced back to how we perceive and comprehend our world. Peppered in amongst this philosophical journey are fun facts about how humans relate to the world, tidbits that lend focus to the author's broader arguments.

However much How Pleasure Works may be convincing to scientists and philosophers, there can be no doubt that is a disaster as a piece of literature. Mr. Bloom possesses a lively voice that finds little difficulty in switching between hard science and soft anecdote in order to maintain the attention of his readers. In every other respect, though, he fails miserably in both his attempt to entertain and his attempt to built a case for his argument. Large swaths of this all-too-brief excursion into the roots of human pleasure are unimaginatively surrendered to anecdotal science, singular events that will be familiar to anyone that has consumed the news in the last ten years. To anyone that has cracked a book on popular science in that same timeframe, though, they are not only uninspired and repetitive, but deeply suggestive of cherry-picked circumstances deployed here to support what is, in every other respect, the ephemeral notion that human pleasure is connected to a metaphysical view of our world. In this, the reader is left feeling chilled by the absence of a genuine demonstration of the author's own research which is almost nowhere to be seen.

Mr. Bloom is a deeply accomplished individual, a man whose achievements must be respected. But in the wake of the disgrace of characters like Jonah Lehrer, men who not only read sweeping, societal conclusions from scientific data, but take dicey shortcuts to do so, we must be wary of books that use anecdote to draw conclusions about human nature. We must have higher standards. For How Pleasure Works reads like a cheap attempt to earn a little coin from the credulity of those seeking answers, none of which will be found rooted in what is clearly more of a philosophical text than an empirical one. If we do not demand more, this is what we will get, 150 pages of one man's half-hearted attempt to say something profound.

Thoroughly disappointing... (2/5 Stars)

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

From The Week of July 09, 2012

Humans set great store by good character. Virtues from kindness to generosity are understandably packaged up and sold as a commendable ideal to which we'd all do well to strive. Those who succeed in earning this elusive monicker are heralded as paragons of the community, dependable souls who keep the world turning, while those who fall sinfully short are dismissed as wretched creatures, disappointing offspring who weigh society down with their weak wills and their depraved souls.

Notwithstanding its judgmental nature, there are no surprises here. Communities should self-select for virtuousness over sinfulness. They should cultivate integrity, honesty and drive. But what if these virtues are not teachable? What if they aren't innate? What if they can be realized and relinquished, attained and discarded, by the same human based on nothing more than circumstance? Society would implode, torn apart by an untenable realization that virtue is malleable and that trustworthiness is situational. And yet this is precisely the contention advanced by Mr. Zimbardo's excellent rumination on the nature of evil.

In 1971, while a young grad student at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo conceived of an experiment that would shake the ivory towers of psychology departments the world over. Selecting two-dozen paid volunteers from a pool of nearly a hundred, Zimbardo established a life-like prison in the basement of the university's psychology building into which he poured his willing participants, each of whom was given a role as either a guard or a prisoner. Guards were bestowed with nightsticks and uniforms, anonymizing sunglasses and supreme authority. The only check on their power was a prohibition against physically abusing any of their charges. Prisoners, meanwhile, were, like their real-world counterparts, compelled to let go of their individuality by adopting a uniform outfit and dehumanizing numerical designations. They were caged and malnourished, also like real prisoners, and warned that disobedience would be punished. If the experiment became too intense, they were free to quit at any time.

This was a college experiment, staged on college grounds, directed by a college graduate and performed by college students. It ought to have been, in every sense, a controlled and controllable experiment. And yet, over the next six days of the scheduled two-week experiment, the experiment's designers witnessed, in the abusive guards, the degraded prisoners and the wardens who allowed the many acts of humiliation to take place, a shocking, nightmarish truth about human nature, that human decency is situational, that good people, when endowed with extraordinary authority, are capable of equally extraordinary cruelty, that those who are deprived of their liberty quickly become cognitively captured by the degradation of their environment, and that those involved in such power scenarios are completely oblivious to these profound shifts in behavior. Simply put, while we can be said to have baseline personalities that are the gestalt of all of our experiences, these personalities are made utterly malleable by the demands and the temptations of authority to the extent that, when placed in altered circumstances, they are re-shaped to fit a newer and darker reality.

Reflecting on this seminal experiment and those that came after it, Mr. Zimbardo, in The Lucifer Effect not only examines the chilling degree to which we can be made monsters by circumstance, he applies these experimental results to the horrors of the Abu Grabe prison scandal which rocked the US military during the early stages of the most recent Iraq War. He details how, for humans, normal is a variable, not a constant. It can be shaped and toyed with, stretched and manipulated, such that not even the humans affected by it comprehend that their normal has changed. While Mr. Zimbardo points out that this logic can be beneficial, used to elevate dark normalities by slowly lifting them into the light, he acknowledges that this is vanishingly rare compared to the frequency with which kings and warlords, revolutionaries and drug-traffickers, prey upon human malleability to debase the noble and silence the unwilling.

Though burdened at times by Mr. Zimbardo's oppressive humility, The Lucifer Effect is a captivating journey through human nature. His premise, that institutional circumstances made good apples bad, rather than the common view that bad apples sour good barrels, claims both the ring of truth and the solidity of good research to support it. All other contentions appear to fall well short of convincing when set against the terrifying evidence of both Mr. Zimbardo's revolutionary experiment and Abu Grabe, it's real-world counterpart.

However, more fascinating than even the monsters and the revelations unleashed here are Mr. Zimbardo's reflections on the nature of heroism. He spends a considerable portion of his work contemplating why some among us appear to be largely immune to the seductions of authority. Indeed, such paragons appear to actively resist such authority, fully aware that to do so is to profoundly jeopardize their own self-interests and even their safety. And yet these individuals do so anyway, secure in the knowledge that right is right and that no darkness can separate them from virtue. After being chilled to the bone by the author's analysis of authority's power, the notion that, to some degree, goodness stands beyond and above temptation is as heartening as it is mystifying.

No 600-page, autobiographical text on human psychology has the capacity to be gripping. But if such work can ever claim to be revelatory in a meaningful way, The Lucifer Effect claims the mantle. For it compels its readers to re-imagine not only human nature in general but the suffocating nature of prisons and the extent to which they leech from both guards and prisoners alike hope and humanity. Well done... (4/5 Stars)

A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr

From The Week of December 05, 2011

Every human who has lived since evolution bestowed self-awareness upon his species has, from time-to-time, considered the many whys of his existence. Why am I alive? Why am I me? Why do I do what I do? Though answers to these questions have proven to be too individualized to be generally applied to the human race, this has not dissuaded countless generations from building narratives, stories, even mythologies, in an attempt to bring clarity to life's most eternal quandaries. For if we cannot understand our motivations or our aims, then how can we possibly live a coherent, healthy life?

While many of us have considered these questions, only a relative few have devoted their lives to solving them. Their explanations may be confusing, their methods may be scattered, and their motivations may be grandiose, but there can be no doubt that, in attempting to grapple with the foundations of what it means to be alive, they have advanced our knowledge and brought us closer to understanding ourselves. A Most Dangerous Method is a biography of three such figures. Neither their names, nor their contributions, will soon be forgotten.

Mr. Kerr, a clinical psychologist and historian, here, reconstructs the lives and the theories that elevated Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung from clinical obscurity into the pantheon of cultural immortality. Examiners of the human mind, this famous pair, Austrian and Swiss, Jewish and Christian, came together in the early years of the 20th century to create and codify Psychoanalysis, a semi-systematic attempt to treat mental illness by sifting through the human subconscious for clues to the inner conflicts plaguing the afflicted. A patient being subjected to Psychoanalysis would be told to confess their dreams, fears and fantasies which would be used to build a profile of the person's mental state. Unresolved issues could then be teased out by the clinician, allowing the patient to resolve his issues by confronting the underlying cause of his condition.

Though their insights undoubtedly lead to a better understanding of the human mind, and though their efforts unquestionably helped the many suffering souls they treated, their science was, argues Mr. Kerr, shaky at best. When not enveloped by their own psycho-dramas, Freud and Jung acted more like prophets of a sacred faith than spearheads of a new, scientific endeavor. The tactics they deployed against those who disagreed with them were machiavellian and vengeful, revealing a predisposition for self-importance that no amount of dream journals could cure. More over, though they were successful in helping their patients come to grips with a wide range of abuse and neglect, their efforts to rationalize and explicate the traps of the human subconscious fell back on mythology more than method, making their conclusions vulnerable to errors of logic and supposition.

Into this revolution steps the third and here-to-for unremarkable figure of Sabina Spielrein. Youthful and intelligent, the Russian immigrant to western Europe and western thought first surfaces when she is treated by Carl Jung for histrionics. As a byproduct of her treatment, a profound, and sometimes sexual, attachment is formed between doctor and patient that would, in some form or another, last for the remainder of their lives. Jung not only attracted Spielrein's love, he seems to have encouraged her study of psychology. Though Spielrein would go on to earn a doctorate, becoming an eager pupil of masters Freud and Jung, and though she had insights that might have received noteworthy praise at any other time, Spielrein, like other adherents of the faith of Psychoanalysis, was caught up in the intellectual feud between Freud and Jung that, having once erupted, never healed. For as much as they could claim to reveal the infirmities of others, they could not detect or treat their own.

Though Mr. Kerr's biography of the triad who gave birth to Psychoanalysis succeeds in shining worthwhile light on the complex personalities of Freud and Jung, and though it does posthumous justice to the wronged Sabina Spielrein, a woman history unfairly forgot, A Most Dangerous Method is, otherwise, an overly meticulous reconstruction of the early history of Psychoanalysis. Perhaps for those already learned in the concepts championed by Freud and Jung, Mr. Kerr's deconstructions of the interplay between our three protagonists, along with his analysis of their insights, reads as an intelligent and incisive critique. Not so for this layman who found himself repeatedly plunged into the deep end of Psychoanalysis and its many preconceptions. Rather than educate the reader on the nature of these ideas, Mr. Kerr presumes a level of proficiency that most of his audience lacks, leading to an unnecessarily opaque and technical 600-page adventure through what is clearly an important topic.

For all this, Mr. Kerr is a talented biographer. Wherever he might have erred in the theories of the piece, he steps right when portraying the three flawed geniuses who occupy the heart of this story. Spielrein's preoccupation with an inner demon tormenting her life, Jung's obsession with mythology and Freud's insistence on being the high priest of his own science are vividly explained and backed up by correspondence exchanged between all three principals. Their triumphs and their failures are understood through the lens of their own biases which they, in spite of being armed with keen minds and cutting-edge theories, could never outrun.

As a biography, wonderful and gripping work. As an explicator of Psychoanalysis and its place in modern psychology, it leaves much to be desired. All in all, a powerful if flawed read. (3/5 Stars)

Among The Truthers by Jonathan Kay

From The Week of July 24, 2011

Though those of us who are rationalists wish it otherwise, our world is shaped by popular opinion. It does not matter if said opinion is based on logic or reason. What matters is the extent to which said opinion can issue forth from an individual and find traction in a broader world yearning for an easy explanation. When we garnered our news from journalistic sources, popular opinion was, to an extent, safely harbored from extremism because it was in the best interests of journalistic publications to get the story right. But as Mr. Kay argues in Among The Truthers, with the rise of the Internet, control over popular opinion has all-but-entirely slipped out of the hands of the moderating media and fallen into the newly empowered grasp of conspiracy theorists and grudge-mongers who use their expanded platforms to pedal their narrow ideologies. Exit Walter Cronkite; enter The Blaze, or any of a thousand sites of its conspiracist kind.

So just who are these conspiracists? Who are the new shapers of popular opinion? And just how much do we believe them?

From the 9/11 Truthers to the Obama Birthers, from false flaggers to anti-Zionists, Mr. Kay, a decorated journalist for the National Post, throws himself headlong into the modern conspiracy movement. From its leaders to its adherents, he vividly describes their belief systems and their pathologies and, in doing so, quickly generates a fairly consistent portrait of a modern conspiracist. He is invariably male, dogged in the pursuit of truth, distrustful of authority, and perfectly willing to devote his life to his cause. In fact, the cause is what lends meaning to his damaged life. Though the personalities of the men Mr. Kay meets are markedly different, these commonalities connect them across the new conspiracy market which Kay describes as a series of islanded fringe thinkers who have been networked into a community by the interconnectivity of the Internet, a system which has both homogenized and supersized conspiracism.

In Among The Truthers, Mr. Kay mounts a two pronged effort to enlighten the reader about the major conspiracies floating through the Western world and to explain the pathologies of their adherents. Though he is pleasingly successful with the former, it's the later, the fascinating profile he generates of those who worship at conspiracism's altar, that elevates his work from engaging to outstanding. The damaged survivor, the fail historian, the endurer of the midlife crisis... Their backgrounds can be wildly divergent, but in these highly intelligent and endlessly opportunistic few, the outcome seems depressingly similar. The essential aspect of reasonableness that most humans enjoy collapses under the weight of their pain, plunging them into a distorted reality in which they have been victimized, their potential guttered by omnipotent forces beyond their control. It becomes their destiny to spread this revelation to the world and now, with the Internet to fuel them, they've never had a bigger pulpit.

This is easily in my top five reads this year. Engrossing and enlightening in equal measure. This is not a polemic against conspiracism; there is no rancor here. There is only a need to understand and to explain, a desire Mr. Kay ironically shares with his captivating subjects. (5/5 Stars)

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

From The Week of May 29, 2011

Mr. Ronson is a fascinating journalist. He has somehow married an irrepressible interest in the bizarre and the fringe with a relentless will to pursue his stories to the bitter end. This blend of admirable doggedness with less-than-healthy obsession is what gave The Men Who Stare At Goats, his tremendously successful exploration of the U.S. Military's pursuit of the paranormal, its punch. But now he has turned to a far more serious topic, one that begins with a mystery and ends with a wary eye cast over its shoulder.

In The Psychopath Test, Mr. Ronson is sparked on a journey through psychopathy after he is asked by a female academic to investigate a strange case. She, along with several of her fellows, have been receiving an odd book from a mysterious author. Though Mr. Ronson quickly solves the mystery, its conclusion causes him to wonder about the role manipulative people play in society. What follows is a thorough and gripping account of his odyssey through the world of psychopaths, from the institutions that have attempted to treat them, to the men who have tried to profile them, to the hospitals that have hoped to restrain them. Between his fascinating interviews with possible psychopaths, he relates the history of these rare and strange humans while using a now famous checklist of psychopathic traits to spot them in his midst. But while this effort succeeds in entertaining and educating the reader on the state of psychopathy, it is Mr. Ronson's investigation of how psychopathy might affect our world that lends his tale a chill not easily shaken. From fuhrers to CEOs, Mr. Ronson pictures a world where the murderous and the inexplicable are made logical by imagining that psychopaths, more often than we might expect, occupy the seats of power.

Much of Mr. Ronson's work is marked by a characteristic over-anxiousness which causes the reader to wonder if he's allowed his imagination to take him a few steps too far, but he's a journalist, not a scholar. His job is to explore and examine, not to be soberly analytical. He wants his readers to join him in peeking over the edge of the abyss, to see what might be down there. In this, he is immensely successful. This is excellent gonzo journalism, moving, creepy and thought provoking. I might not sleep well tonight. (3/5 Stars)

The Wisdom Of Crowds by James Surowiecki

From The Week of May 01, 2011

Historically, the leading lights of our world have held a low opinion of the masses, dismissing them as dirty, uneducated and uncultured. But according to Mr. Surowiecki, this elitist thinking couldn't be more mistaken. It may be that individual members of the mob are dirty, uneducated and uncultured, but if the collective intelligence of the mob is tapped, it has the capacity to provide astonishingly accurate answers, in the aggregate, to questions that experts struggle to get right. How can this be? Why would a crowd understand a problem better than an even expert?

Mr. Surowiecki argues that crowds are wise because they not only filter out wildly inaccurate answers, they tap into an evolutionary truth that our brains have evolved to work optimally in a communal setting. Singly, someone might reason his way to a foolish action, but if that person is part of a crowd, he might receive advice not to commit the action, thereby moderating his behavior. Mr. Surowiecki is quick to point out that the wisdom of crowds can be deceptive. Crowds are much more susceptible to groupthink than individuals are. Not only that, they cannot solve problems that require specialized knowledge if none of their members have that knowledge. A crowd doesn't know how to do brain surgery if none of its members are neurosurgeons. And yet for all of the crowd's limitations, its powers can be exploited to unearth fascinating truths. This is no more demonstrably true than for prediction markets, which have been established to allow people to make bets on everything from electoral outcomes to terrorist attacks. The participants of these markets are a crowd and Mr. Surowiecki vividly details just how eerily accurate they can be.

The Wisdom of Crowds is a thought-provoking read which ranges from economics to human psychology, to politics in a largely successful attempt to convince the reader that there is an underutilized power in crowds. But while Mr. Surowiecki makes his case with a good balance of rationality and enthusiasm, he's forced to put so many caveats on crowd wisdom that I was left to wonder if the knowledge gleaned from crowds could ever truly be trusted. Taken as an interesting intellectual exercise, The Wisdom of Crowds is a fun and engaging read, but it feels far too ill-defined to be taken more seriously than that. The major exception to this conclusion are prediction markets, the efficacy of which are completely compelling. (3/5 Stars)

Harvard And The Unabomber by Alston Chase

From The Week of February 27, 2011

Though this is primarily a biography of Ted Kaczynski and his fascinating, troubled life, Mr. Chase, who has written extensively on animals and the environment, allows himself the freedom to roam beyond the Unabomber's dramatic actions. He devotes as much time to the man's theories and the times that created him as he does to the man himself and, as a consequence, has assembled here a sweeping and satisfying history of a man who thought he understood the future and, to say the least, liked it not at all.

Ted Kaczynski is remembered, of course, as the Unabomber, the man whose home-made bombs terrorized seemingly random businesses in the 1980s. Though his campaign actually claimed only three lives, its psychological impact was sufficient to coerce the New York Times into publishing his 35,000 word manifesto on the perniciousness of technology. Kaczynski believes that technological dependence will lead to the enslavement of the human race and it was this which motivated him to mail out his bombs to places which proliferated such technology.

Before Kaczynski was the Unabomber, however, he was a brilliant mathematician whose mind, according to one faculty advisor, was sharp enough to solve a problem that maybe ten, contemporary Americans could solve. But as clever as he may have been with numbers, he was equally anti-social, a problem helped not at all by being skipped two grades in high school which only furthered his isolation. As a consequence, the Kaczynski who arrived at Harvard at the age of 16 was ill-equipped to defend himself against the psychological attacks from Henry Murray, a famous and clearly cruel professor of psychology at Harvard who very much belonged to the right wing ethos of American universities that existed prior to the liberalization of the 1960s. Mr. Chase needed only to describe the barbarous tactics used in Dr. Murray's test to explain how this traumatizing incident could have contributed to Kaczynski's radicalization.

This is an excellent biography of a difficult subject. For while Kaczynski is clearly damaged, he's also, at times, a sympathetic figure. At one point, in the 1960s, he flees civilization for the peace of the Montana wilderness, removing himself from a world he disagrees with. But civilization follows him, invading his solitude by mining his hills, paving roads through his wilderness. It's only after these incursions into his world that he gets angry enough to lash out. Our world is an ever-changing place that is incredibly insensitive to those who do not deal well with such change.

The extent to which Mr. Chase is able to explain Kaczynski by keying on the events which turned him into the Unabomber is impressive, revealing a broken man who lacked the tools to articulate himself without the use of violence to acquire the world's attention. Yes, it's all here, from Kaczynski, to his family, to his bombs, to the FBI's effort to catch him. And it's all told with one eye always turned towards the bigger picture of the man in his time.

Kaczynski is wrong, of course. He believes that the use of technology will inevitably lead to a future day in which we invent intelligent machines to do our labor for us. Whether we master these machines and have them facilitate our lives, or whether the machines overthrow us and enslave us, either way we will be slaves to their power, dependent upon them to exist. So far, pessimistic but logical. However, when Kaczynski concludes, from this, that the only solution is to return to a world prior to the Industrial Revolution, just to escape a future that may or may not come about, he loses, well, everyone. Because, of course, we can't go back to a world prior to the Industrial Revolution! Not only would we be consigning billions of people to starvation and death, we can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. We know how electricity works, how Relativity works, how the sun works, how energy works, how fossil fuels work, all of which catalyze the ignition of civilization. We know how to make guns, cars, planes, boats, bombs... That knowledge can't be wiped out, not completely. Somewhere, somehow, someone will rebuild what was destroyed. And if, on Kaczynskian grounds, they refuse to do it, someone in the future will once Kaczynski's lesson has been forgotten. Progress is inevitable. And if this means that we are on the road to enslavement, then enslavement it will be. That doesn't mean, until then, that we sacrifice all our agency and give up. Who knows what the future will hold, but we do know this. It's impossible and foolish to go back.

A thought provoking book. (4/5 Stars)

The Wire In The Blood: Tony Hill 02 by Val Mcdermid

From The Week of November 21, 2010

Having consumed The Mermaid's Singing, I oughtn't have been surprised by the darkness and the venom in Ms. McDermid's work. And yet the cruelty expressed in this second installment in her series featuring Tony Hill, clinical psychologist and profiler of violent criminals for the British police, took my breath away.

Having established his profiling unit, Dr. Hill ought to be happy. His professional successes are not only making him famous, they are making Britain safe from psychopathic killers. But Dr. Hill is too busy to be pleased with his success because, having won himself his unit, he now has to fill it with quality people, many of whom lack the requisite training to see the world with his clarity. While Tony is schooling his charges, girls are turning up murdered, young girls, troubled girls, girls the police have thus far dismissed as runaways. But Tony and his unit know better and they set about their first case, attempting to catch a vicious predator who boldly hides in plain sight, a killer who possesses only contempt for human life.

If Ms. McDermid is sometimes too graphic, she has an admirable capacity to apply the everyday realities of life to her characters. Consequently, Carol Jordan doesn't remain Tony's partner forever, as would be the case if this was an American TV show; she is promoted and moved onto her own patch, with her own case, with her own troubles. This B plot, the case of an arsonist, does yeoman's work supporting the A plot, Tony's killer whose identity is revealed to the reader early on. This has its intended effect of frustrating and terrifying the reader as the killer systematically picks off victims right under Tony's nose. The Wire In The Blood is easily 200 pages too long, bogging down in unnecessary digressions, but when it's good, it terrifies, the malevolence of its villain flooding from his cruel deeds.

Decent work. Ms. McDermid isn't afraid to let the guillotine fall on important characters, but this is far too loose and a bit too graphic for my tastes. (3/5 Stars)

The Mermaid's Singing: Tony Hill 01 by Val Mcdermid

From The Week of November 14, 2010

Having watched the British television show inspired by this series, I imagined that I had some inkling of the dark and creepy world I'd be inviting into my head. But Ms. McDermid overpowered my defenses. This effort isn't ambitious enough to re-imagine the crime genre, but it does defy enough of its tropes to make it a singularly eerie entry.

Dr. Tony Hill has a secret. To the world, he is a clinical psychologist with a full slate of scary patients who are clearly too ill to be allowed beyond their four padded walls. Inside, though, Dr. Hill is sufficiently troubled by events in his past that he is incapable of forming healthy relationships with women. To the doctor's credit, he is aware of his own deficiencies and goes some way to applying his training to their rectification, but he is, still, a lonely creature who lacks not only a social life but anything resembling a close friend. Professionally, Dr. Hill has been trying for some time to establish a center for national profiling in Britain, a thinktank that would collate crime data and bend the minds of trained psychologists to the cracking of cases that have stumped the police. He's only in the pilot stages of this program, however, when a series of sadistic murders in Bradfield force the police to turn to him to help them find a killer who has easily evaded them.

Tony may have advocates for his program, but not everyone in the police hierarchy is thrilled with his meddling. Consequently, he is partnered with a young, ambitious cop, Carol Jordan, and together, they are set on the scent of a killer who has reached back into medieval times for inspiration, victims left savaged in ways that only Tony seems unaffected by. The future of Tony's profiling program, not to mention the lives of innocent Britains, hang on their capacity to intuit an answer that will lead them to the right butcher.

Though it's not clear if Ms. McDermid drew inspiration for Tony Hill from the real Kim Rossmo, the similarities are compelling. He too attempted to force the Vancouver Police Department to take profiling seriously. Their obstinacy lead to the deaths of dozens of women as Robert 'Willie' Picton was allowed to run amok in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The Mermaid's Singing does not require anyone to know the Kim Rossmo story to be enjoyable, but it certainly adds an additional ghoulishness to an already tight and creepy tale. At times, Ms. McDermid ambles when she ought to be running, and she comes rather close to insulting the intelligence of her readers by implying that her hero may be responsible for the horrors being perpetrated, but there's far more good here than bad, good as long as you have a strong stomach. (3/5 Stars)

Hitler Youth by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

From The Week of October 31, 2010

Ms. Bartoletti has assembled here a wonderful and frightening primer on that most powerful of forces, the will and the vigor of young people. In the 1920s, before he had become one of the most destructive forces in human history, Hitler was a mostly powerless thug with a hateful ideology and no way to implement it. But then a program was born, thought up and made reality by Hitler and his cadre, a plan to harness the frustrations of the jobless youth and grant them not just a purpose but an outlet for their anger. In a frighteningly short period of time, Hitler had an army at his fingertips, an army loyal only to his ideals, an army willing to smash and intimidate any opposition. But while the Brownshirts helped sweep Hitler into power, he needed a system capable of extending National Socialism to the next generation of Germans, the youth of the new, Third Reich.

Enter the Hitler Youth, a paramilitary organization modelled on the Brownshirts which inculcated children, some as young as 10, in Hitlerian doctrine. Though the children were given a basic, academic education,the main focus of their training was the transformation of their bodies into machines of war. They needed the skills and the knowledge to fight for Hitler, to fight for Hitler's Germany, not the knowledge of the book, of the weak way. The Hitler Youth were loyal footsoldiers, invaluable to the leadership both as exemplars of Aryan supremacy and as a feeder system of Nazis into the military, baptizing the armed forces in National Socialism. Ms. Bartoletti discusses here the methods used to indoctrinate these young men and women, the highs they experienced, and the betrayals they suffered. For when the army was exhausted and shattered, it was the Hitler Youth left to defend Berlin, at the end, beardless boys against grizzled Soviet troops.. And their leader, their father, having taken the easy way out, putting a bullet in his own brain...

This is a quick, edifying read. There is no power in this world like youth power. But it can be deployed for ill as effectively as for good. That's as true today as it was in the darkness of the Third Reich. This is not the first book to make this argument, or to expose the betrayal of youth in this way, but it is a welcome entry in a lesson that cannot be learned enough. (3/5 Stars)

Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me by Carol Tavris And Elliot Aronson

From The Week of August 15, 2010

To best appreciate Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, both respected social psychologist's, this reader recommends an open and inquisitive mind. For this is not a sedate stroll around the edges of science. This is a sometimes difficult and always confronting climb up the mountains of self-deception and self-justification which, to some degree, challenge us all. That said, mistakes Were Made is charming, well-researched, and satisfying for those seeking to shine a little enlightenment on human behavior. (3/5 Stars)

Click here to read my full review up at my website.

The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

From The Week of May 02, 2010

It could be anyone, argues Ms. Stout, an American psychologist at Harvard: your boss, your co-worker, your friend, your father. According to the the Mclean Hospital, in a random sampling of 25 people that you know,odds are that lineup will include a sociopath. When the condition was first diagnosed, it was called Guiltlessness, an accurate summation of a neurological pathology which liberates its sufferers from the burden of a conscience. No guilt, no shame, no remorse, no compassion... Without these emotions, one cannot experience empathy. And if one cannot experience empathy, then one cannot experience humility. It's difficult, it turns out, to have humility when ones worldview is reduced to the strong versus the weak, the superior versus the inferior, the smart versus the thick.

Ms. Stout does a wonderful job frightening the reader half to death by describing, in vivid, eerie detail, the powers of a sociopath. Unencumbered by debilitating emotions, they are free to manipulate those around them in the cruellest and most brazen of ways. And they do love to manipulate. Rather than suppress their desire to compete, the absence of a conscience turns sociopaths hyper-competitive, driven by a need to demonstrate their superiority. They will use anyone necessary to achieve their ascendance because, to them, superiority is all that matters. Ms. Stout fills in her description of Sociopathy and its role in our society with disturbing portrayals of personal cases in which she has offered therapy to the victims of Sociopathy, men and women so twisted round in knots by their tormenters that they often don't even believe that they've been victimized. To think that such powerful and unchained minds operate throughout society, at every level of government, business, education, finance, sends a chill down the spine.

How true are Ms. Stout's claims? Reading her account of sociopaths leaves one with the strong impression that civilization should have long ago collapsed under the weight of millions of crushed personalities, that the perniciousness of this mental illness is a rampant and untreated malignancy that's metastasized through society. And yet we're all still here, notionally healthy, many of us the fortunate beneficiaries of loyal families. So where's the damage? Ms. Stout argues that the perpetrators are, of course, largely confined to very specific circles of society, positions of high power which convey upon the sociopath the legitimacy they crave. But of course, there's no way to prove this. All humans manipulate. Even if sociopaths are better at it than we are, thanks to their ruthlessness, how much better? How much better does one have to be to be considered a sociopath? These questions make it difficult to measure their impact, let alone put a hard number on how many of them breathe our air and operate our institutions.

This is a powerful and unnerving book, filled with real examples of damage done to good people by sociopaths.. To the extent that it raises awareness of this cruel condition, Ms. Stout has done good here, discussing at various points ways to both recognize and cope with a sociopath. But she does seem to suffer from an affliction common to authors of non-fiction, a tendency to over-inflate the importance of their subject matter. This is almost inevitable when we consider how much time must be invested to research their subjects. Nonetheless, it is an ailment to which Ms. Stout is not immune. This is good and edifying work, but I wonder if the world is just a bit more sane than Ms. Stout would have us believe. (3/5 Stars)

Switching Time by Richard K. Baer

From The Week of February 14, 2010

For those of us blessed with mental health, and though we may sometimes take it for granted, it is difficult to imagine a worse torment than the loss of ones mind. And yet that torment must be as nothing compared to what the sufferers of Multiple Personality Disorder are forced to endure. What would it be like to lose whole stretches of time and to not know why? What would it be like to realize that you've been acting during your lost hours, relating with other people, in situations utterly foreign to you? What would you do? What would you be willing to sacrifice to regain your sanity?

Dr. Baer relates, in Switching Time his experiences with one of his patients, a relationship that lasted many years and survived many trials. As he patiently assists the woman in piecing her life back together, we learn that her condition is caused by childhood trauma so dark, so awful, that it will not be discussed here. Suffice it to say that it is no wonder that the woman's mind broke under the strain of what she was forced to endure at the hands of those she ought to have trusted most.

Though the medicine practiced here is fascinating, the human story overwhelms the procedure. How many undiagnosed sufferers of MPD are out there, even now, survivors of unspeakable events, not knowing why they are losing time? Losing their lives... A stunning read and a must-consume for anyone even mildly interested in the plight of the mentally ill. (4/5 Stars)

The Score Takes Care Of Itself by Bill Walsh

From The Week of January 17, 2010

In 1979, coming off a 2/14 1978 season, the San Francisco 49ers, then one of the NFL's most pathetic franchises, hired a head coach with no prior experience in the NFL. He was 48-year-old Bill Walsh, a collegiate coach who, while a known commodity in the, was an unknown to the team's beaten-down fans.

Nine years later, in 1988, Bill Walsh would retire, having transformed not only the 49ers into the most successful NFL franchise from 1980 to 2000, he forever changed the style of play in a league once dominated by hyper-basic, run-first offenses. Bill Walsh won three Superbowls not by getting lucky, not by stepping into the right team at the right time; he won because he installed an ethos in the 49ers, from the players to the secretaries, an ethos that demanded commitment to detail, respect for ones fellows and success from ones endeavors. He changed the culture of a team and, in doing so, rewrote the NFL's record books.

In The Score Takes Care Of Itself, Bill Walsh, over a series of interviews conducted a few years before his death, ruminates over his successes and failures, spending as much time on his philosophy of success as he does the glorious history of his time at the 49ers. In words eerily familiar to what one might hear at a seminar on good corporate culture, he expounds on his belief that success is based as much on attitude and deportment as it is on talent, and that people are defined as much by their comrades and coworkers as they are by their own actions.

Here are the thoughts of a good man reflecting upon his successful life, a man who achieved more than anyone could've dreamed before voluntarily stepping away and letting someone else take the glory of his creation. We would be fools to ignore his wisdom. We would be unkind not to acknowledge his goodness. (4/5 Stars)

The Political Brain by Drew Westen

From The Week of August 23, 2009

Why do we vote? Why do we vote for certain people? When we watch political ads, what are we really seeing? Do these ads sway elections? Why do some adds work and others do not? Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emery university, grapples with these questions and more in the Political Brain which argues that human beings are fundamentally manipulatable creatures, susceptible to a whole range of tricks that tug at our mental heartstrings. This fascinating read is both educational and entertaining, pointing out, in the spirit of Robert Cialdini, how we are played and how we can recognize it. This book succeeds as much for the reader trying to learn more about politics as it does for the politician trying to cultivate votes.(4/5 Stars)

On Killing by Dave Grossman

From The Week of August 16, 2009

LTC. Grossman, a now retired lieutenant colonel in the US Army, has authored here a work that is as astonishing as it is disturbing. An expert in the study of killing, LTC. Grossman discusses the methods used by militaries the world over to teach their soldiers how to kill. The first half of the 20th century may have been the bloodiest in human history, but On Killing argues that, in fact, most of the soldiers in those wars deliberately fired their weapons inaccurately, in hopes of avoiding killing another human being. However, as the century wore on and military instructors began to incorporate psychological techniques into their training methods, the kill rate for the average soldier shot up, along with an equivalent rise in cases of PTSD among soldiers. It is a provocative argument, but one that LTC. Grossman backs up with statistics and research. His argument has frightening implications for armies of the future which may be completely desensitized to the harsh realities of war. (4/5 Stars)

Influence by rRobert Cialdini

From The Week of August 09, 2009

Robert Cialdini, a professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State university, and a self-confessed sucker, explores, in Influence, why we all struggle to say no to people who offer to sell us junk we don't even want! This is a quick and thought provoking read that details techniques companies and charitable groups use to separate us from our money and offers explanations, scientific and otherwise, for why they are so damned good at it, even when we know their game. (4/5 Stars)