Mental-health professionals should pay attention, and shrewd investors in pharmaceuticals may take interest in Watters’s...
Americans may not be any more deranged than anyone else on the planet—but, says pop social scientist Watters (Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment, 2003, etc.), we are much better at universalizing our afflictions.
“We are engaged,” writes the author, “in the grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of the human mind.” But who is we? There’s the rub, for there is a strong cui bono element in the idea that our psychic well-being or lack thereof should be transportable across borders. But first, the evidence, about which Watters writes sympathetically and elegantly, of the rise of Western-style mental illnesses around the world. None of this should be particularly surprising, given the fraught nature of human life, but Watters adds a twist: The very idea of such maladies is often new, introduced from abroad. Thus, even though given the importance Chinese people traditionally place on food, something like “food refusal” should have been a natural form of rebellion, anorexia was rare until recently, when the Western clinical concept entered the Chinese medical literature at the same time the Chinese mass media began to pay attention to rail-thin Western celebrities and models. By Watters’s account, when the great Indian Ocean tsunami struck Sri Lanka at Christmas 2004, Western clinicians imported the idea of “the kind of mental abscess that results in PTSD” instead of trying to understand the interpretations of the event in the survivors’ own terms. So who benefits? As the author writes, once Big Pharma managed to convince young Japanese that there was such a thing as “depression”—a notion not strictly alien, but bound up in other terms and with other remedies—then it was able to extract millions of new dollars from an untapped market. Throughout, Watters urges that we be concerned about the losses of native categories of mental health and illness in just the way that we lament the loss of other kinds of diversity.
Mental-health professionals should pay attention, and shrewd investors in pharmaceuticals may take interest in Watters’s guess as to what disorder is likely to be big in the near future.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8708-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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BOOK REVIEW
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