The Anatomy of Bias How Neural Circuits Weigh the Options By Jan Lauwereyns Review by David Teira, Ph.D. on Tue, Jul 27th 2010.
More and more often practicing scientists from the most diverse fields are writing books for general audiences with a view not only to communicate their own results or the state of the art in their field, but also to draw the more general implications of such findings for, say, our worldview. Whereas the former can be accomplished reasonably well by any competent scientist with a taste for writing, the latter will be more or less engaging depending on what the author has read beyond her discipline. Jan Lauwereyns is a cognitive neuroscientist and a remarkable poet who also enjoys reading Click here to read the full review!
Clinical Pearls of Wisdom 21 Leading Therapists Offer Their Key Insights By Michael Kerman (Editor) Review by Mark Welch, PhD on Tue, Jul 27th 2010.
The idea of a master class, a forum in which experts reflect at length and pass on a distillation of their accumulated practice wisdom, is not new, although it may be more familiar in the arts than in psychotherapy. However, that is to some extent what this book is. 21 psychotherapists speak about personal approaches to therapy and offer pearls from their experience.
It is not a daunting book, and is structured in an accessible way. There are seven sections, eight if you count the concluding reflection on the therapeutic experience, each with a number of authors. Most of the major areas of c Click here to read the full review!
Psychoanalysis at the Margins is a 'kid in the candy store' experience for a historian of the psychoanalytic journey in America. Stepansky's book is simultaneously a thoroughly sound - and enjoyable - analysis of the crisis, or 'near crisis' facing psychoanalysis and a penetrating examination of psychoanalytic publishing, training, and fractionation of the profession. Had this reviewer read the last chapter first, the concern for the future of psychoanalysis might have been colored slightly more positively during the reading of this very detailed accounting. However, the reader will bene Click here to read the full review!
The Husbands and Wives Club A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group By Laurie Abraham Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Jul 27th 2010.
Any psychotherapy of the worried well has some comic potential, but the idea of group therapy for couples cries out for sly dramatization. You can practically write the script of the group run by Judith Coché yourself: 5 couples meet once a month for a weekend each time, for a year. Some of them have been coming to the same group for a few years. The therapist sometimes has a guest co-therapist to focus on particular aspects of relationships. The couples get to know each other well, and all of them are motivated to resolve the serious problems in their marriages, Click here to read the full review!
Made with Words Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics By Philip Pettit Review by Berel Dov Lerner, PhD on Tue, Jul 27th 2010.
Phillip Pettit (the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University) is a much respected philosopher, and as anyone even barely acquainted with Western thought knows, Thomas Hobbes is usually counted along with the likes of Plato and Aristotle as one of the greatest of political thinkers. In Made with Words, Pettit is relentlessly focused on one objective: to present a synoptic and integrated interpretation of Hobbes's philosophy in as clear a fashion as possible. The underlying unifying theme of that interpretation is the central r Click here to read the full review!
Winnie My Life in the Institution By Jamie Pastor Bolnick Review by Beth T. Cholette, Ph.D. on Tue, Jul 27th 2010.
Winnie: My Life in the Institution is a newly-released softcover Second Edition. This fascinating little book was originally published in 1985, but despite being made into an NBC "Movie of the Week" staring Meredith Baxter (Birney), Winnie's story remained out-of-print for twenty-five years. It has been brought back to life here by author Jamie Pastor Bolnick and Book &rts Press.
Winnie is Winifred (actually Gywnna, as readers come to know later) Sprockett. In 1938, when she was just six years old, Winnie's foster mother, Mrs. Kruller, told her she was going away. Click here to read the full review!
When Experiments Travel Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects By Adriana Petryna Review by Stephanie Sarkis, Ph.D. on Tue, Jul 27th 2010.
Clinical trials (studies on drugs or medical devices in order to obtain government approval) have branched out from the domestic population to the international population. In the book When experiments travel: Clinical trials and the global search for human subjects, Dr. Adriana Petryna examines the reasons for and the ethical issues associated with this evolution of the testing of modern medicine.
Petryna is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the author of another book, Life exposed: Biological citizens after Chernobyl (2002), a Click here to read the full review!
Annihilation The Sense and Significance of Death By Christopher Belshaw Review by Vineeth Mathoor on Tue, Jul 27th 2010.
There are many uses, varieties and possibilities of death. Death has always been a core theme of philosophy, poetry, religion and various forms of arts. In the desire to overcome the 'crude reality' of death, human beings invented stories of souls, reincarnations and mysterious associated with death. Way back in history, there were many philosophers and intellectuals who were involved in solving the mysterious phenomenon of non-existence after death by linking it with spirit, rebirth etc. This simply means that ever since the beginning of life on earth, human beings have been excited about dea Click here to read the full review!
The Unnamed A Novel By Joshua Ferris Review by Natalie Kelley-Wilson on Tue, Jul 27th 2010.
This novel provides thought provoking entertainment while exploring a variety of emotional themes. "It is the heartbreaking story of a life taken for granted and what happens when that life is abruptly and irrevocably taken away". The nuances of sanity and insanity are questioned and explored in juxtaposition with the ideals of family, love and sacrifice. Loss permeates the story throughout; on different levels at various times for each of the characters.
Fiction readers, interested in more than a straightforward story might find that this book resonates with them. There are no obvious answer Click here to read the full review!
The Other Side of Sadness What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss By George A. Bonanno Review by A. Ch. Weizmann, Ph.D. on Tue, Jul 27th 2010.
George A. Bonanno is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Chair of the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Columbia's University Teachers College. His new book is about grief and mourning: his approach is key to our understanding and experience of this issue. The point here is the importance of bereavement and loss, as crucial situations, in human life.
George Bonanno started on his research about in 1991 as Director of a Research Study group on grieving at the University of California in San Francisco. Bereavement, loss and mourning within the psychological trauma Click here to read the full review!
Antimatter By Frank Close Review by Ioannis D. Trisokkas, Ph.D. on Tue, Jul 27th 2010.
This is a brilliant book. It discusses the difficult, but hugely exciting, notion of antimatter in a substantial and enjoyable manner. It consists of nine chapters, two appendices, an index of names and concepts and a short bibliography. The writing style is lucid, informative and at times witty. Although the reader is asked to digest an abundance of scientific and mathematical information, the narrative is interspersed with anecdotes from the history of particle physics, examples from everyday life and illuminating diagrams – this facilitates a better understanding and keeps the reader' Click here to read the full review!
First published in 2004, The Tail of Emily Windsnap was the first in a series of novels about a 12 year old mermaid. It has now been released as an unabridged audiobook. It's a fantasy tale told by Emily herself -- she lives on a boat with her mother. She does not mention her father at first, but we know he is not around. She starts the story with the time at school that she first went swimming at school: she had longed to try it but she had never even had a bath because there wasn't room in her boat house -- she had only had showers. But she has the scare of her Click here to read the full review!
The delusions found in clinical settings are extremely puzzling for the epistemologist. So much is this so, indeed, that their peremptory dismissal (until quite recently), in philosophical accounts of belief, certainty, rationality, truth, interpretation, meaning, agency, and intentionality, is cause for surprise. Today, however, that has changed. Much interesting recent material about delusions has come to us - from philosophers of mind and psychology, from experimental and cognitive psychologists, and from many whose work straddles, and blurs, such disciplinary boundaries.
Lisa Bortol Click here to read the full review!
Many linguists and philosophers of language inspect the structure of talk to understand the nature of thought. Others, like Jeffrey King, claim that the structure of talk is a window to the nature of reality itself. On his view, linguistic expressions instantiate propositions or facts: to utter a sentence 'Axel sings' in the right conditions is to instantiate a particular proposition, a singular fact about the world. Propositions are not mysterious entities that merely provide a common basis for our thought and talk. According to King, propositions are specific ways we Click here to read the full review!
Neurodiversity Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Brain Differences By Thomas Armstrong Review by Sara Hendren on Tue, Jul 20th 2010.
Thomas Armstrong's Neurodiversity comes at a good time in popular disability studies. Its language, intended for the general reader, reflects a commitment to radically re-evaluate our understanding of intellectual and developmental differences: as differences first, and not purely as disorders.
Armstrong takes up the coinage of "neurodiversity," first proposed by autism advocates in the late 1990s, and broadens its scope to include conditions such as ADHD and dyslexia, developmental disabilities such as Down syndrome, and diagnoses like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. "Whether you are re Click here to read the full review!
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