Enlivened by literary anecdotes, but less appealing as social history.
Shorter (Psychiatry and History of Medicine/Toronto Univ.; co-author: Endocrine Psychiatry, 2010, etc.) charges that current diagnoses of mood disorders are fatally flawed and becoming “close to unintelligible.”
The author attributes this to political infighting within the discipline of psychiatry, compounded by the marketing strategies of the pharmaceutical industry. He argues that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders represents a step backward from the pre-Freudian diagnosis of depression as a medical disorder of the nerves and which was treated under the rubric of internal medicine. Past practice was closer to the truth than what is presented in the DSM, which lumps together mood disturbances with severe depression (a debilitating disorder). In the annals of modern science,” he writes, “I am unaware of any comparable wholesale demolition of a field of scientific knowledge and its replacement with a fairy castle of fantasies…the spotlight shifted from nerves, a diagnosis that implicated the whole body, to mood, a diagnosis that implicated mainly the mind.” Compounding the problem is the current practice of treating anxiety and panic attacks as disorders separate from depression. Shorter suggests that a combination of barbiturates and amphetamines was a superior treatment than today's pharmacopoeia, which relies on Prozac and similar antidepressants. The release of DSM5 (the latest revision of the manual) has been the occasion for a critical review of current treatment practices, but Shorter's contribution to that discussion, while timely, is questionable.
Enlivened by literary anecdotes, but less appealing as social history.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-994808-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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