Review of The Yipping Tiger by Perminder Sachdev

There are many popular books on neurology, neuroscience and psychiatry, including those by the well known neurologist Oliver Sacks, and the wildly successful title The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. When he visited Australia recently, Doidge's sessions at writers' festivals were filled to capacity, and it was not difficult to see why: his own speaking style was professional but warm, he could answer any question, and he was offering the hope of our brains being more 'plastic' than we thought, and able to heal from stroke and injury.

Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Review of Rape: Sex, Violence, History by Joanna Bourke

I read this impressive and intensively researched book from the point of view of an educated general reader, a woman and a feminist, but not an expert on rape or sex crimes in general. It is highly controlled, well argued and scholarly, but with little jargon, and she does occasionally interject her own feelings. In fact, she states in the preface that her reason for writing the book was fear, followed by anger at a statistic: 'I read a Home Office report that revealed that only 5 per cent of rapes reported to the police in the UK ever end in a conviction' (vii). This anger does not drive the text, but it indicates the passion that ignited the task, and the book is better because of it. And each section has an epigraph, verses from Cecil Day Lewis' poem 'Sex-Crime', which balances the facts with poetic representation of the injustice of rape and its aftermath.

Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Review of Source by Janine Burke

This handsome-looking book, with the Ansel Adams photograph on the dustjacket, attracted me, although I paused at the ‘healing’ in the subtitle. It sounded a little flaky, and I didn’t acquaint nature with the healing of any of the artists and writers listed. Some of them did not seem to be very ‘healed’ by anything, such as Jackson Pollock, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. But I was prepared to be convinced that I was wrong.



I was already reasonably acquainted, as most readers would be, with some of these artists and writers, who have been researched and written about by many people before Burke. So I thought that this might be a synthesis of Burke’s own observations from her travels to the territory of each of these great creators, and in a way it is. The imprecise tone in the Introduction and the first chapter, with its decidely banal feel, took me aback, though. ‘Creativity is a place’? ‘The artistic process itself is a journey’? Was it really going to be flaky all the way through?

Review continued at M/C Reviews 'words'.

Review of The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

It was reported recently that Raj Patel had been declared a Messiah by a religious organisation. Apparently, this was misleading, as the group did not name him specifically. Patel's response was a good-humoured, slightly embarrassed, denial and a statement that we shouldn't be relying on Messiahs of any sort to tell us what to do anyway.



Patel is a writer, activist and academic who has both worked for the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, and protested against them, as described on his website. Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System was his first book, clear and convincing in its arguments as to why so many people are obese and so many are starving, and why we need to rethink food production. Patel continues to emphasise in The Value of Nothing the need for us to think beyond being mere consumers if we are to change the inequities in our system, to reinvigorate democracy everywhere and at every level, and to understand how power inequalities cause poverty and suffering throughout the world.


Review continued at M/C Reviews 'words'.

Review of Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Secret, a book by a former television producer called Rhonda Byrne, professes to contain all that you need to know to be healthy, wealthy and happy, distilled from the wisdom of many thinkers over the ages. The essence of this secret is that if you believe hard enough that money, health or love will come your way, it will. Send your wants out into the universe, and the universe will send you the goods back.

It’s this type of positive or magical thinking that Barbara Ehrenreich criticises in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. She generally argues her case convincingly, using a good balance of the personal and research material. Some of it is eye-opening, laughable, infuriating.

If you are familiar with the author’s work, you will know that she is a prolific writer about social, cultural and political issues, including women’s rights. Her previous books have included Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA and Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. And in an interesting contrast to this current title, she has also written about collective joy, what she feels we really should be aiming for in life, rather than the pale, manufactured imitation represented by positive thinking.

Ehrenreich’s book has eight chapters, beginning with her own experience of breast cancer and the ‘pink ribbon culture’ she encountered, through business and finance, employment, religion and ‘the science of happiness’. She uses humour judiciously, stepping into satire when required.

Continued at M/C Reviews 'words'.

'Walking in our shoes' - Asylum by Christopher Payne

If my heart could speak,
I’m sure it would say, I wish I were
someplace else today.
Among these books, a great amount of knowledge there must be,
but what good is knowledge where others carry the keys. (201)


These lines are from a poem written by an unnamed (probably unknown) patient on the wall of a basement in Augusta State Hospital in Maine. The first line in blue, the rest in red, the words are large and neat with idiosyncratically placed capitals. Christopher Payne has placed this photograph at the end of the main section of his images in Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, just before his own afterword. It’s like the final statement on the treatment of mental illness, a combination of acknowledgement that things have improved, but that much remains to be done. Payne’s enabled one of the former patients to have their say, albeit indirectly, after both he, his camera, and Oliver Sacks have spoken for them.



This is a truly beautiful and haunting book, Payne’s skill with the camera evident in nearly 200 pages of photographs of asylums, showing their massive exteriors and some more intimate interior spaces, along with the farms, dairies, gazebos and cemeteries of their surroundings. He shows the extent to which American society wished to provide ‘enlightened’ care for its mentally ill population. Nearly every state had at least one asylum, and by 1948, there were 539 000 patients in these institutions (13).

Continued at M/C Reviews.

Review of The Good Doctors by John Dittmer

In the light of current debates over health care, this book provides some sobering and relevant insight. Towards the end of his thorough and balanced history of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), John Dittmer provides a chapter entitled ‘Health Care Is a Human Right’. It has an epigraph from Aristotle:

If we believe that men have any personal rights at all as human beings, they have an absolute moral right to such measure of good health as society, and society alone, is able to give them. (228)

This chapter details the setting up in 1967 of a community health center, called the Tufts-Delta Health Center, in Bolivar County, Mississippi. It offered free clinical health services to the mainly black community and eventually ‘prescriptions for food’ to treat the malnutrition that was shockingly widespread. The staff ‘attacked the root causes of poor health and deprivation’ (233), organizing sanitation and providing education, with the involvement of the residents a crucial component. It served as a model for the development of other health centers.

Dittmer then leads into a discussion of the efforts by many in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Senator Edward Kennedy and the MCHR, to put forward plans for a national health program, noting that the ‘United States was the only industrial country without a national health program covering all of its citizens’ (236). Those efforts were thwarted by the American Medical Association (AMA), and pharmaceutical and insurance corporations, who all condemned the non-profit approach to medicine, too much government intervention in health care, and the view that health care was a right not a privilege. As there was no consensus as to what sort of plan should be implemented, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s trip to China took attention away from the issue, and there was no consumer push for action, nothing was done. President Clinton tried it again in the 1990s, and was defeated. Now the administration of Barack Obama is feeling the same resistance.

Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.