All Reviews
Reviews are listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent review appearing first in the list.
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
It’s not easy writing about ambient music. It is hard to describe how it sounds, and it is also hard to describe how it makes you feel. Weide…
Sex, or the Unbearable
Sex, or the Unbearable, is a dialogue written by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in which they discuss sex, relationalty, the negative, failure,…
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
The title of the novel sets out the main idea. Harry August lives his life again and again. Each time his body dies, he starts again, but wit…
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The Peripheral Mind
Diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2005, István Aranyosi commenced a treatment regimen that included chemotherapy in the form of vincristi…
A Philosopher Looks at The Sense of Humor
Not only is Richards’s book delightful, inspiring and intellectually stimulating, it’s fun to read. Besides providing further food for thought, Richards…
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Almost a Psychopath
This book is part of The Almost Effect series, a group of books written by Harvard Medical School faculty and other professionals “who offer gui…
Beauty Queens
Beauty Queens is a satirical dark comedy with subversive tendencies, eventually revealing strong humanistic ideas. While aimed at a young…
Believing
In this colloquial book Michael McGuire aims to settle difficult questions about the nature of belief: what it is; its relation to the brain and behaviou…
Ben Behind His Voices
Ben Behind his Voices is a book about one family’s journey from the chaos, of Ben’s schizophrenia, to hope. The professional…
Controlling Your Drinking: Tools to Make Moderation Work for You
Before I write another word, I should mention that this book claims center-stage on my desk. . Any patient who walks into my office, expressing concerns…
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Dear Killer
There are some interesting ideas behind this silly novel. Kit is a teenage girl, about 16 years old. She lives in London with her parents, go…
Finding the Right Psychiatrist:
Robert Taylor has lots of skepticism about modern psychiatry and he has many well-argued views about how modern psychiatry should be practiced. It…
Human Bonding
Human Bonding is both a celebration of the contributions of one of the great scholar-teachers of those bonds and a wonderfully effective series of integr…
Mindshaping
Tadeusz Zawidzki’s magisterial volume hypothesizes that the human species, from the perspectives of its evolution (or phylogeny) and individual developme…
Mortality
I teach psychology to postgraduate students undertaking their PhD or Masters in clinical psychology. At some point, usually close to finishing, they inva…
Perv
Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering provides an interesting, humorous, and in some cases also rather controversial view of hum…
Prisoner of Night and Fog
Gretchen Muller is about 18 years old, living in Germany in the 1930s. Her uncle Dolf is better known as the leader of the National Socialist party…
Redefining Rape
In Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, Estelle B. Freedman states that one solid definition of rape has nev…
Short Term 12
Short Term 12 is a powerful and inspiring movie about a treatment facility for young people. It combines the stories of the teenagers at t…
The Book of Woe
An important contribution to the history and understanding of applied psychology, psychiatry and medicine, this volume recounts the creation of a remarka…
The Cognitive-Emotional Brain
The relationship between emotion and cognition is complex, but often thought to be simple: emotion is frequently viewed as being distinct from cognition,…
The Folly of Fools
I read a chapter of The Folly of Fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life one day recently, and I do not regret a single mome…
Wild Awake
Wild Awake is a tale of loss and recovery. Kiri is 17 and is spending the summer alone. She rides her bike around her city, and she…
A Cooperative Species
In A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis provide a carefully argued evolutionary account…
Addiction Trajectories
Addiction Trajectories provides a creative blend of anthropology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy, and it does so through the engaging…