All Reviews
Reviews are listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent review appearing first in the list.
A Tragic Kind of Wonderful
Mel Hannigan is nearly 17 years old and has rapid cycling bipolar disorder with mixed states. Her elder brother, who also had mental illness, died not th…
Developing the Virtues
It is well known among academic philosophers that the study of the virtues, a preoccupation among the ancients, has become again a respectable field of s…
Frank Ramsey (1903-1930)
It’s odd to include the dates of a biographical subject’s life in the title of the biography/memoir. But in the case of Frank Plumpton Ramsey, one of the…
Goodbye, Things
In Goodbye, Things, described as a “bestseller” in Japan, Fumio Sasaki describes a minimalist lifestyle and argues that it can lead to a much ha…
Monsters, Demons and Psychopaths
Fernando Espi Forcen’s monograph about Monsters, Demons and Psychopaths: Psychiatry and Horror Film is so complete that I fear that anything I s…
Moral Brains
Moral philosophers routinely invoke gut-feelings when they investigate their subject matter. They observe, for example, that ‘we’ seem to judge that harm…
No Place to Hide
A house fire. A suspicious death. A serial killer to catch. When a body is found in a house f…
Psychiatric Hegemony
The profession of psychiatry, along with related fields (the “psy-professions”), is the subject of criticism from a variety of quarters. That is, of cour…
Rick Sings
In Rick Sings poet Phil Taggart vividly illuminates how he has come to accept his psychotically disabled and often homeless younger br…
Sex, Family, and the Culture Wars
Welcome to the 1950s, when men were men and women were women, and everything was just fine. Then, according to Cherry, various social movements of the 19…
Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember
Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is from a Korean family. She was born in New York, and went to school in Queens. She had a stroke at 33 in 2007, which she wrote…
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The Animals’ Agenda
Bekoff and Pierce argue that animals should be treated much better than they are. They start from the idea of the…
The Arrangement
The most interesting figure in The Arrangement is pundit Constance Waverly, quoted at the start of each chapter from her books, her articles for…
The Big Fix
HBO’s documentary Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street (sometimes available on Youtube) was r…
The Delight of Being Ordinary
Author Roland Merullo has written twenty-two previous books of both fiction and non-fiction. He is best-known for his prior series of road trip nov…
The Ethics of the Family in Seneca
Liz Gloyn’s new book The Ethics of the Family in Seneca offers a careful exegesis of letters and other key texts written by the famed Stoic sage…
The Keeper of Lost Things
Ruth Hogan’s debut novel is set in England, some time after the Second World War. Most of the time it does not feel contemporary, although there are occa…
The Routledge Companion to Free Will
The Routledge Companion to Free Will is a thorough and engaging review of classic and contemporary positions on free will featuring 60 new essay…
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The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, covers both the life stories and the intellectual work of Amos Tver…
Transgender Children and Youth
Despite transgender children receiving more attention, acceptance and understanding than previous decades, along with many of the rights of transgender c…
Always Too Much And Never Enough
Jessica Singer grew up in the 1980s in New Jersey. She had issues with food fairly early on and they got worse. Sh…
Art and Politics
Segal’s book has seven largely independent essays exploring the role of art in politics, starting with Europe in the First World War, then covering Diego…
Children and the Politics of Sexuality
Liza Tsaliki’s Children and the Politics of Sexuality provides a much needed counter-voice to the widely held beliefs current in the Western Wor…
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Freud
This is a translation of a book published in Paris in 2014. The author defines her argument as follows: “…what Freud thought he was disco…
Learning from Baby P
Learning from Baby P is Sharon Shoesmith’s detailed and comprehensive account of the media-driven witch-hunt that followed the 2007 rape and mur…