Sp!ked review of books preview | Prohibition makes an evidence-based comeback. So exclaims author Christopher Snowdon in his latest book The Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition since 1800 . After all, given that – as he puts it - ‘few fiascos are more notorious’ than America’s so-called ‘Noble Experiment’ with the prohibition of alcohol in the early twentieth century, you could be forgiven for thinking that the prohibitionists themselves would have become weary by now. But this has not come to pass. As Snowdon rightly notes, new generations of prohibitionists are alive and thriving and finding more insidious ways than ever before to restrict our freedom to consume what we like. There can be no doubting the ambition of Snowdon’s panoramic view of the history of prohibitions over the past two centuries. As he points out, we are seeing an ‘eclectic mix’ of world-first prohibitions by new ‘pioneers of prohibition’. “Today Snowdon sees Prohibitionists once again gaining the upper hand against liberals” Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked .
Hollowing out the ivory tower. Professor Alison Wolf is a breathless speaker – as I discovered while trying to keep up during the course of our interview. But as the author of Does Education Matter? Myths About Education and Economic Growth , and more recently of the government-commissioned Review of Vocational Education , Wolf is certainly worth listening to on the plight of British universities. And nowhere is her insight more valuable than when it comes to tackling what she has called ‘the great secular faith of our age’ – namely, the idea that education is the key to economic growth, swelling both an individual’s bank balance and expanding a nation’s GDP. article continues after advertisement There’s no doubt that this is a faith with many followers. And not just among a political class that has long trumpeted, as Tony Blair did in 1997, the importance of ‘education, education, education’.
“‘Pouring out skills is not one of the key ways in which you generate growth’, says Wolf” In Does Education Matter? The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? by Marcia Angell. The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch Basic Books, 226 pp., $15.99 (paper) Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker Crown, 404 pp., $26.00 Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis by Daniel Carlat Free Press, 256 pp., $25.00 It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives.
What is going on here? The authors emphasize different aspects of the epidemic of mental illness. William Styron, unlikely bard of depression. - By Nell Casey. When I first met William Styron, in the summer of 2001, he was frail, barely back on his feet after a brutal bout with depression. I met him and his wife, Rose, at a bookstore where we read from Unholy Ghost, a collection of essays on depression I'd edited, and to which both Styrons had contributed. I was taken aback by Styron's vulnerability. It was his ravaging sorrow that had brought us there, but still somehow his reputation as Famous Writer (and the few brusque phone conversations that preceded our meeting) had trumped his reputation as Depressed Person in my mind. As we talked, his hands gently trembled, and he spoke with a far-off quietness, as if his words were traveling from a great distance.
When Styron died last week of pneumonia at the age of 81, obituary writers scrambled to assess his literary achievements. Styron disliked the term depression, calling it "a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. " And Styron's timing was right. The Illusions of Psychiatry by Marcia Angell. The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch Basic Books, 226 pp., $15.99 (paper) Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker Crown, 404 pp., $26.00 Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis by Daniel Carlat Free Press, 256 pp., $25.00 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) by American Psychiatric Association American Psychiatric Publishing, 992 pp., $135.00; $115.00 (paper) But with the introduction of psychoactive drugs in the 1950s, and sharply accelerating in the 1980s, the focus shifted to the brain.
When psychoactive drugs were first introduced, there was a brief period of optimism in the psychiatric profession, but by the 1970s, optimism gave way to a sense of threat. In the late 1970s, the psychiatric profession struck back—hard. Such is modern psychopharmacology. The Dawn of Politics by Adam Kirsch, City Journal Spring 2011. Francis Fukuyama goes back to the beginning. OSF/Clive Bromhall/Animals Animals/Earth Scenes The chimp way of war: for Fukuyama, a primitive form of political life It’s possible that Francis Fukuyama does not take unmixed pleasure in his fame as the author of The End of History and the Last Man.
Ever since Fukuyama published that book in 1992—indeed, ever since he published the article on which it was based in The National Interest in 1989—he has been shadowed by the phrase “the end of history.” Since then, he has written five more books on big, complex subjects, ranging from the decline of trust in American society to the future of genetic engineering, and he has participated in countless policy debates. Yet on the cover of his new book, The Origins of Political Order, he once again is identified as “the author of The End of History and the Last Man.” But it is hard to avoid thinking that Fukuyama is after even bigger game. John Gray: The Knowns And The Unknowns. The Knowns and the Unknowns Sometime in the early 1970s I had an illuminating conversation with an expert on Soviet affairs.
We ended up discussing Solzhenitsyn, and the expert expounded the view that the writer illustrated the emergence of liberal values in opposition to Soviet totalitarianism. I disagreed. Certainly Solzhenitsyn was anti-totalitarian, but that did not make him any sort of liberal. It was around that time that I stopped listening to Sovietologists. Not for the first time, grand theories of social evolution proved to be useless as guides to events. Jonathan Haidt’s book is an example of this genre, one of the most sophisticated to date. A part of The Righteous Mind is a useful critique of the primitive type of rationalism that has lately been in vogue. The fixation on belief, according to Haidt, exemplifies an outdated view of the mind. Haidt’s view is more realistic. From one angle, seeing morality in groupish terms is simply being realistic.
The God Species by Mark Lynas - review. The political and environmental profile of climate change has been dramatically reconfigured in the past two years. A wave of activism has dissipated and a broad consensus on the necessary measures broken thanks to the failed Copenhagen summit and the anti-global-warming lobby's apparent triumph in the Climategate emails affair. Mark Lynas is one of a growing band of influential figures, along with James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and George Monbiot, who now argue that the approach of most Greens to climate change needs to change. Lynas puts it briskly in this new book.
"Gobal warming is not about overconsumption, morality, ideology or capitalism. It is largely the result of human beings generating energy by burning hydrocarbons and coal. " Environmentalists, of course, do want to address global warming: Lynas's other target is the rather large constituency who feel the need to deny it altogether. Sp!ked review of books preview | Admit it: environmentalism was an ugly experiment. Last November, Channel 4 aired What the Green Movement Got Wrong , which featured prominent environmentalists, including Lynas, reflecting on the failures of environmentalism. The film claimed that environmentalists’ opposition to technologies that offered environmentally benign methods of energy and crop production had impeded their aim of creating an ecologically sustainable society.
Since then, the debate between pro- and anti-nuclear environmentalists has deepened, exposing the many divisions that exist within the green camp. That said, the green movement has never really been united by a coherent perspective that could withstand criticism with confidence. Instead, it has been more easily characterised as intransigent, its critics simply dismissed as ‘deniers’ funded by big business. However, the object of Lynas’s criticism is not the substance or ends of environmentalism but merely its means. As a result, there is much to agree with in The God Species . User comments. Sp!ked review of books preview | ‘Man is more than an overdeveloped monkey’ As the author of many books on a polymathic range of subjects, be it philosophical anthropology, literary criticism or the computational theory of the mind, Professor Raymond Tallis is entitled to boast. For not only was he a prolific writer during the early hours, by day he was a doctor with a specialist research interest in clinical neuroscience.
His, it is fair to say, has been a life of little recline so far. ‘I don’t need much sleep’, he tells me, ‘because anger wakes me up. As my prostate now does, too.’ Cue yet more laughter and another swig of lager. But despite the jokes, despite his effortless conviviality, Tallis is both serious and being serious. First, the rebuke. Given the ubiquity of neuromania, Tallis must be piqued daily. Rest assured, however, that wherever someone is trying to penetrate the intracranial darkness, Darwinitis is never far behind. There is a chill to Tallis’s lament.
Tim Black is senior writer at spiked . User comments. Three Golden Rules for book reviewing: What are they? - By Robert Pinsky. Possibly the most famous book review, ever, was written by the young Irish wit and polemicist John Wilson Croker. Croker is still remembered, though obscurely, as a founder of modern political conservatism. What's more, according to some sources, John Wilson Croker invented the very term "conservative.
" The opening passage of Croker's review, published in the September 1818 Quarterly Review, displays his formidable and venomous approach. What he writes is smart as well as odious. Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. Few 21st-century journalists can match the cool snark-power of this passage. He continues, with a well-calculated, languidly aristocratic tone of affected vagueness, as though not sure where he read a snotty phrase he borrows: [Mr Keats] is a copyist of Mr Hunt; but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype ... 1. Adam Kirsch Reviews Vasily Grossman's "Life And Fate"
WRITING THE STORY of the Holocaust is a futile ambition—not because the events of 1939 to 1945 are too horrible to be told, but because they are too various to be compressed into one definitive or representative story. The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis came from every part of Europe, from every social class and profession and age group, from every point on the spectrum of Jewish life between militant atheism and traditional piety. All these stories had a similar ending—but then, so do all human stories, and the monotony of death does not annul the immense multiplicity of life.
Inevitably, however, we tend to create a generic Holocaust narrative out of the tales we hear most often, and find most easy to identify with. As Americans, we respond to stories of assimilated Western European Jews who are gradually shut out of their country’s life, like that of the German diarist Victor Klemperer. All of these are truths about the Holocaust, but they are not the only truths. Straight by Hanne Blank, reviewed. George Eastman House Collection.
You quondam liberal-artists out there—veterans of lit-crit and queer theory, men and womyn formerly fluent in what Said said and all that Lacan cant—may yet remember that we live our lives according to a system of social constructs. The idea of race did not exist until colonialism required it. The notion of the self was thoroughly obscure until the Enlightenment dawned. The teenager didn't exist until the Industrial Revolution told him to get off its lawn. Now from Hanne Blank comes a chewy piece of scholarship—Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Beacon)—that puts a spin on the hip-hop catchphrase "no homo," explaining that there was no hetero until social science and pseudo-science invented a need in the middle of the 19th century. Straight covers an impressive bit of social-historical ground despite being, true to its subtitle, a compact production. Courtesy Hanne Blank. Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games,” review.
Rebecca Stead chose to set her children’s novel “When You Reach Me”—winner of the 2010 Newbery Medal—in nineteen-seventies New York partly because that’s where she grew up, but also, as she told one interviewer, because she wanted “to show a world of kids with a great deal of autonomy.” Her characters, middle-class middle-school students, routinely walk around the Upper West Side by themselves, a rare freedom in today’s city, despite a significant drop in New York’s crime rate since Stead’s footloose youth. The world of our hovered-over teens and preteens may be safer, but it’s also less conducive to adventure, and therefore to adventure stories. Perhaps that’s why so many of them are reading “The Hunger Games,” a trilogy of novels by Suzanne Collins, which take place at an unspecified time in North America’s future. Her heroine, Katniss Everdeen, lives in one of twelve numbered districts dominated by a decadent, exploitative central city called the Capitol.
Ruth Franklin: Was ‘Frankenstein’ Really About Childbirth? “I have no doubt of seeing the animal today,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote hastily to her husband, William Godwin, on August 30, 1797, as she waited for the midwife who would help her deliver the couple’s first child. The “animal” was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would grow up to be Mary Shelley, wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of Frankenstein, one of the most enduring and influential novels of the nineteenth century. But Wollstonecraft would not live to see her daughter’s fame: She died of an infection days after giving birth. The last notes that Wollstonecraft wrote to Godwin are included in the exhibition “Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet,” which began last year at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and has now come to the New York Public Library.
Most critics have understood Frankenstein as a cautionary tale of the dangers inherent in intellectual hubris: the Tower of Babel reworked as science fiction. A Night in Arzamas - Jordan Smith. Nobel Winner Eric Kandel: ‘The Age of Insight,’ Memory, the Holocaust, and the Art of Vienna. Steve Hahn: If X, Then Why? Book Review: Social Conquest of Earth. The Art of the Heist: Valuing Art through Its Theft. 'Ameritopia': How Dumb Can Political Philosophy Get? - The Chronicle Review.
Review: A Singular Empire. What Makes Countries Rich or Poor? by Jared Diamond. Debt by david graeber. Laurent Binet’s “HHhH” and Historical Fiction.