Uninformed Reader Research Articles

Encyclopedia of Psychotherapy, Volumes 1 and 2

Encyclopedia of Psychotherapy, Volumes 1 and 2

Nature Lessons

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessNature LessonsRoxanne Lanquetot, M.A., M.S.Roxanne LanquetotSearch for more papers by this author, M.A., M.S.Published Online:1 Dec 2003https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.54.12.1662AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Nature Lessons, a novel by Lynette Brasfield, is partly autobiographical. Brasfield moved to the United States from Durban, South Africa, to escape from her mother, who had schizophrenia. I can understand her need to run away. Growing up with a psychotic parent is a nightmare. I had to go to France to escape from my mother, who had the same illness.Kate, the book's heroine, is 40 years old, unmarried, and childless. She lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. She is waiting for Simon, ex-fiancé number three, to pick up his things when a letter arrives from her mother. Thinking that it brings news of her mother's "enemies," she doesn't open it immediately. The half dozen letters she has received since she left 18 years ago were full of paranoia and admonishments to her daughter to remain in the United States, safe from the inherent dangers in South Africa, her country of birth. But this letter is different. Her mother begs her to come back to Durban to discharge her from the hospital where she has been incarcerated, supposedly for treatment of cancer. The letter awakens Kate's dormant feelings of guilt, and she decides to return to South Africa to rescue her mother.Kate has harbored the guilt since childhood, when she refused to accompany her mother to Cape Town to escape before Uncle Oom Piet could take her to the hospital. Forced to live with her uncle's family during her mother's first hospitalization, Kate was teased mercilessly by her cousins, but she didn't care. She felt that the punishment was merited, because she had refused to leave Durban before it was too late. Many children of people with mental illness, like Kate, feel guilty and wish to be punished for not preventing a parent from becoming mentally ill.This book is well written, and the narrative flows. The plot is colored by Zulu folklore. A white girl's relationship with a black boy makes apartheid come alive. Figures of speech and descriptions are highly imaginative. For example, "her [Kate's mother's] thick legs encased in stockings, beneath which unshaven hair … curled into small Catherine-wheel whorls," and "[Kate's] brain felt like a hot air balloon—untethered and drifting, unable to find a place to land." After her father died, she imagined his heart being marched off in handcuffs. Anecdotes about her three fiancés and numerous lovers are lighthearted and amusing. The author cleverly switches from Chagrin Falls to South Africa both in the present and during Kate's childhood, delineating changes by chapter headings, dates, and locales. Themes of Kate's mother's involvement in a scandal and her father's possible murder are mysteries that are not solved by the adult Kate until the end.I recommend the book both to the lay public, who will find it good reading, and to mental health professionals, who have heard stories of the trauma of living with a mentally ill parent from their patients and who will see these experiences come alive in the form of a novel. My only criticism is that mental illness as an organic brain disease is never clearly explained, and an uninformed reader may be left with the impression that the scandal was the cause of psychosis instead of a stress factor.Ms. Lanquetot is a writer as well as teacher-coordinator of children's classes at the children's inpatient service in the department of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.by Lynette Brasfield; New York, St. Martin's Press, 2003, 275 pages, $23.95 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 54Issue 12 December 2003Pages 1662-1662 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2003 Published in print 1 December 2003

Women's Mental Health: A Comprehensive Textbook

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessWomen's Mental Health: A Comprehensive TextbookLeslie Hartley Gise, M.D.Leslie Hartley GiseSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Jan 2003https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.54.1.117AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail If you want a comprehensive reference book on women's mental health, this 638-page volume, edited by two women, would not be a bad place to start. The strength of this book is that it is like a little encyclopedia.Women's Mental Health is a welcome addition to the number of new textbooks addressing gender issues and would be a good starting point for getting an overall familiarity with a topic. The heavy referencing is a major asset. The scope is comprehensive, covering historical features as well as both psychological and biological perspectives. The 37 chapters are brief but cover a lot and maintain striking readability. A few chapters include tables that are useful for organizing large amounts of data. Some of the authors are among the best known names in the field.Of the 72 authors, 57 (80 percent) are women. Case examples are not used, and the book is less clinical than other texts. There is some redundancy—for example, the chapter on anxiety addresses the effects of pregnancy, and the chapter on pregnancy addresses the effects of anxiety. However, this repetition is useful for such neglected topics.The division of the book into five sections works well. The first section addresses the psychobiology of women and the reproductive life cycle and sets the stage for the next four sections. The second section focuses on gender differences in the major psychiatric disorders and includes a chapter on complementary and alternative medicine. A chapter on body dysmorphic disorder supplements the chapter on somatoform disorders. The third section considers psychiatric consultation but does not address the psychology of medical illness or typical consultation requests from obstetrics and gynecology, such as evaluating fitness and safety for motherhood. Neither does it integrate the relationship between psychiatry and other medical specialties or the stress and conflicts for physicians caring for women that affect the consultation process and women's health care.The fourth section is called "Sociocultural Issues for Women" but includes psychology. A biopsychosocial perspective appears with a discussion of psychological sequelae of long-term medical complications among diabetic women but is absent with the omission of the biology of the trauma response. The important topics of lesbians, women of color, and aging are included. Some sections on conditions that affect women more than men, such as plastic surgery and multiple sclerosis, do not specifically address gender issues. Finally, the fifth section contains an elegant review of issues for research and a consideration of policy issues primarily related to women of childbearing age.Women's Mental Health focuses on what is known and the mainstream point of view rather than on major controversies in the field of women's health and mental health. The focus seems to be the presentation of the information and not primarily critique or interpretation, which is both a strength and a weakness. The strength is that the information is there for the reader to synthesize and interpret. The weakness is that the uninformed reader is not given guidance on interpretation of data.Dr. Gise is affiliated with the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.edited by Susan G. Kornstein and Anita H. Clayton; New York, Guilford Press, 2002, 638 pages, $65 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 54Issue 1 January 2003Pages 117-118 Metrics History Published online 1 January 2003 Published in print 1 January 2003

Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism (review)

It may seem odd to write here about a book that seems, at first glance, to have only limited interest in either drama or performance. In fact, given Robert Crunden's broad scope in Body and Soul—art, music, and letters—it is surprising that theatre enters his study as little as it does. For instance, he rarely mentions Eugene O'Neill as anything more than a guest at various New York soirées. And yet, despite theatre's apparent absence, elements of performance permeate Crunden's case studies to such an extent that one feels as if theatricality were far more essential to his argument than he himself admits. Although he never fully connects European performances, such as Relâche, to his history of American modernism, one gradually sees that such performances were of great interest to individual artists, writers, and musicians and served as important influences on their work. In this way, performance seems to hover in the background of modernism as a constant, if often ignored, influence. For the uninformed reader, this is a significant limitation. One could read Body and Soul never realizing that William Carlos Williams, e. e. Cummings, and Gertrude Stein ever wrote plays. However, for the reader interested in a broad history of art, music, and literature in which to situate America's theatrical modernism, particularly in relation to jazz, Crunden's book provides a rich, if somewhat fragmented, history.

Review of: Criminal Profiling

Abstract This work of Mr. Turvey appears as a text book of 25 chapters enhanced by several appendices, a glossary, and an index. While the book is under Turvey's authorship there are four contributors identified. The writing style is generally casual with expressions of personal sentiment and bias included. There is a suggestion that the author is more in need of impressing rather than educating the reader. Neither the comprehension nor the objectivity are strengths of this work. To the casual reader the omissions of historical work in criminal psychopathology and psycho dynamics may not be noticeable nor will that be of behavioral analysis and its variance through different schools of thought. The presentations are superficial and fail to reveal the actual depth to which one's training and experience need be to function as a member of an investigation team and perform crime scene behavioral reconstruction, analysis, and profiling. Mr. Turvey does not enlighten the reader with the normal differences in “profiling” based on the variance between schools of thought on human behavior. At present one may consider three categories of approach strategies and within each there can be expected variances. These issues are not addressed and the uninformed reader is left to believe that “profiling” is some generic process.

Comment on “Crustal deformation measured in Southern California”

From studies of deformation at the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), Shen et al. (Eos, October 28, 1997) found that postseismic effects are both significant and long‐lasting. While this is reassuring, the tone of this article may suggest to the uninformed reader that such effects are a new discovery, and especially since recent SCEC reports [Jackson et al., 1997; Shen et al., 1997] provide little indication of the rich history and literature on the phenomena of postseismic viscoelastic relaxation. While there are limits on the number of references in any article, the reference in Shen et al. [1997] pointing out the significance and persistence of postseismic deformation is a Science Perspective article of Jackson et al. [1997]; the latter article, while expressing excitement about the observation of postseismic effects in GPS data and how such effects may be used to provide information about the crust's inelastic properties, is nonetheless devoid of citations or even of any analysis concerning this phenomena.

Guide to the Battle of Shiloh (review)

book reviews251 fortysomething readers!), as are George Skoch's masterful maps. The endnotes and index contribute to the narrative's effectiveness and appeal to scholarly and general audiences. Gary Gallagher, a history professor at Pennsylvania State University, has again shown why he is a master editor-historian. These fresh, engrossing interpretations deserve book-length expansion. Gallagher and his colleagues have paved the way for the writing of "new" history of the "old" war. Ervin L. Jordan, Jr. University of Virginia Guide to the Battle of Shiloh. Edited by Jay Luvaas, Stephen Bowman, and Leonard Fullenkamp. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Pp. 253. $12.95.) The format of the series known as The U.S. Army War College Guides to Civil War Battles is based on a combination of comparison eyewitness Union and Confederate reports, supplemented by detailed maps, to interpret combat tactics , maneuvers, assaults, obstacles, achievements, and failures associated with several pivotal battles of the American Civil War. In this new volume, the authors journey across the Appalachians to the West and tackle the savage and confusing Battle of Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, fought in April 1862. Following the formula used in earlier volumes on Gettysburg, Antietam, Chickamauga, and Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, the Shiloh text is primarily based on lengthy extracts from the Official Records, to the exclusion of other primary sources. For over half of the twenty-five tour stops selected to represent random phases of the combat, several detailed and thought-provoking eyewitness impressions relate the fighting experienced at Shiloh. The combination of Federal and Confederate reports give an "on the ground," chronological context for the battle and provide insight into the physical and psychological obstacles that challenged Civil War soldiers in combat. However, at many tour stops, comparison reports for both Federal and Confederate combatants are not presented. In many sections where only Federal, or only Confederate, reports are presented, the user has no opportunity to place the one-sided extracts in context relative to the overall "face ofbattle" experienced by both armies at that location. Thus, the image of Shiloh presented for the user is unbalanced, with several important phases of combat somewhat distorted. In addition, narrative extracts from postwar publications by Confederate colonel William Preston Johnston are incorporated as if they relate firsthand experience of Shiloh. The uninformed reader could falsely assume that Colonel Johnston (son ofthe Confederate Army commanderAlbert Sidney Johnston) was present and witness to the combat he describes. In fact, Colonel Johnston was stationed in Richmond, Virginia, on April 6 and 7, 1862, where he served as a military aide to President Jefferson Davis. This fact is never acknowledged for the reader. 252CIVIL WAR HISTORY The most unfortunate problem with the book is with the troop position maps. These maps, intended to be vital resources to assist the user in reconnoitering the ground where the battle was fought, are critically flawed and contain many errors. They are difficult to read and contain no contour topography or elevation information. This provides a two-dimensional (flat) view of the rugged terrain that governed the formation and the direction of the battle, as fought, on the Shiloh plateau. A modern overlay of Shiloh National Military Park, which illustrates current conditions for both forest and fields, is used as the base map. Beyond random identification of a few principle creeks, roads, and the Tennessee River, no geographical referencing ofthe important 1862 cultural landscape features is provided. Identifying these historical landscape features—the boundaries of fields and wood lines; primary roads, farm lanes, and traces; and over seventy log homes, barns, and churches—interprets the Shiloh plateau as experienced by the soldiers in 1862. On many of the maps, a number of the primary roads and creeks are not identified; and, although 90 percent ofthe roads present today are the same historic routes used by the armies in 1862, the authors incorrectly cite these as modern roads "built to take the visitor around the battlefield ." Besides not adequately citing terrain features on the maps, several army organizations (regiments, brigades, and batteries) are incorrectly identified, and/ or, their movements and positions are incorrectly located in context to both time and space for various phases of battle...

A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space

Henri Lefebvre, who died last year at an age between 86 to 89 (the records aren't clear), was perhaps the greatest Marxian thinker since Marx, and certainly one of the greatest philosophers of our time. Sociologists can appreciate significance by realizing that what they know of Marx's work itself is quite limited. The latter has been homogenized and simplified by generations of textbook writing and misleading scholarship.' To understand Marx it is necessary first to know how he thought and analyzed social phenomena, rather than what he said. By this I mean an understanding of the powerful dialectical schema that Marx developed in critique of both Hegel and Fichte.2 Lefebvre was one of the very few analysts of society who really knew how Marx thought, and it is indicative that one of first books was on Marxian dialectics (Lefebvre 1939).3 This work contains many of the themes that Lefebvre was to develop later. In 1974 Lefebvre published a monumental book, The Production of Space, which has just appeared in translation (1991) and which the publisher claims to be his major philosophical work. I would rank another work, three-part book The Critique of Everyday Life (which is being translated only now), as most significant, but the book on space must rank a close second. Yet Lefebvre also has made important contributions to the theory of the state (a four-volume masterpiece), to the sociology of the arts, to poststructuralism, to existentialism, to scholarship on Descartes, Pascal, Nietzsche (as early as 1939), and Lukacs, among other thinkers, and to the theory of modernity/ postmodernity.4 What I like most about Lefebvre is how he engaged time. He did not write in isolation, but lived the life of a Parisian intellectual and participated in lively debates with others about the nature of Marxism, political action, the intellectual foundations of structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernity, and (reaching back) existentialism. Consequently he took the trouble both to read the work of others and to attempt a dialogue in writing-a rarity among American academics. When reading Lefebvre, one can find all sorts of sometimes veiled, sometimes explicit references to the current ideas and books in the Parisian milieu, which may escape the uninformed reader.5

A Life of Anne Brontë by Edward Chitham, and: The Invisible Woman. The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin (review)

Reviews105 case for identification, he merely suppUes the caption, "Alice's 'white knight' was probably based on Tenniel himself* (96), leaving the uninformed reader to suppose that this knight L· the white knight from Alice. In fact, it is "The Elritch Knight," glossed as "a self portrait by Tenniel"—but for that information one has to go to the jacket flap, as it is nowhere discoverable in the book. Nevertheless, this is a valuable book, and a handsome one, full of fine reproductions and fascinating information on the graphic artists of the day. And Alice scholars can take away with them plenty of memorable anecdotes about the author-illustrator relationship. When Harry Furniss told Tenniel in 1885 that he was to Ulustrate CarroU's Sylvie and Bruno, Tenniel responded, from the length and depth of his experience, "I'U give you a week, old chap; you wUl never put up with that feUow a day longer" (98). Juliet McMaster University ofAlberta Edward Chitham. A Life ofAnne Brontë. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. vü + 216 + plates. $29.95 US (cloth). Claire Tomalin. The Invisible Woman. The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. With a new postscript: "The Death of Dickens." London: Penguin, 1991. ? + 333 + plates. $12.95 CDN (paper) On first consideration, it would seem that no two women could be as different as Anne Brontë, the serious-minded clergyman's daughter, and EUen Ternan, the daughter ofa theatre couple, or two worlds more distant than that of a respectable governess and that of a denizen of the morally suspect world of the stage. Yet on closer examination, it is apparent that despite the most obvious differences, they shared a paraUel existence. Claire Tomalin calls Ellen Teman, the actress who had a thirteen-year relationship with Charles Dickens, "the invisible woman," but Anne Brontë also has some claim to that epithet in spite of her published works. Both women were Uttle known or understood even in their own time. Brontë has been seen through the filter of her more famous sister, Charlotte, while Teman was seen through the screen of a carefully maintained domestic image, an image of respectabUity and decorum that family, friends, biographers, and even the great man himself were determined to preserve. Neither woman left much written 106Victorian Review evidence of her existence. Beyond her pubUshed poems and novels, Uttle else that Brontë wrote has survived. Not surprisingly, Teman, in her moraUy and sociaUy difficult position as the mistress of one of the nineteenth century's greatest Uterary figures, left few personal records. In his introduction to A Life ofAnne Brontë, Edward Chitham writes, "it is part of the biographer's task to bring his subject to Ufe, to explain her attitudes, feelings, and thoughts" (7). His concern is to present a very readable biography, one that wiU appeal to the "fresh reader" as weU as the seasoned Brontë scholar. The task of bringing Anne Brontë to Ufe is compUcated by timited sources and the way in which they have been interpreted in the past. Interest in the Brontes began with the pubUcation of Mrs. GaskeU's biography of Charlotte Brontë just after the latter's death. Although the biography contained information about Anne, it was second-hand information suppUed primarily by Charlotte. Literature about the Brontes expanded in the twentieth century, but GaskeU's text continued to be used as the primary source. Because so few documents directly relating to the Ufe of Anne Brontë have survived, her own writing has been used extensively for biographical information—particularly by Winifred Gerin in her highly regarded biography. Chitham, while considering Germ's work to be significant, criticizes her "simpUstic view" of the autobiographical elements in Bronte's novels (3). His approach is to examine topographical and chronological sources, even though they may not mention his subject at all, and compare them with the fiction. It is true that other biographers, including Gerin, have considered such sources. Gerin, for example, beUeved it a particular advantage on her part as a biographer to be an actual resident of Haworth (viii). Chitham argues, however, that this approach has been neglected by previous biographers. By emphasizing topographical and chronological sources, Chitham does bring...

Opinion Polls: Right or Wrong? A Lesson in Social Research

Points out that there were 50 nationally published political polls during the British 1992 election campaign period – 39 of which, converted into seats, would have given a hung Parliament, eight of which suggested an outright win for Labour, and three of which gave the Conservatives a victory. Addresses why so many opinion polls apparently got it wrong, and takes the reader through some of the reasons for the discrepancy, such as the nature of opinions, sampling considerations, non‐response, and the effect of opinion poll results themselves. Tries to inform the uninformed reader in order that the results of future opinion polls might be evaluated more clearly.

Animals in Research

To the Editor.— To the uninformed reader, the historical review Animals in Research1provides a compelling case for continued animal research. However, one should be suspicious of any conclusions of the American Medical Association, which has publicly aligned itself politically with the National Association for Biomedical Research,1,2an advocacy group devoted to the interests of animal researchers. Many medical historians, who do not share the American Medical Association's political agenda and who merely attempt to describe medical history accurately, have come to strikingly different opinions. Careful analysis has demonstrated that key discoveries in cancer therapy,3immunology,4and anesthesia5have resulted from clinical research, observation of patients, or human autopsies. Beeson6concluded: Progress in the understanding and management of human disease must begin, and end, with studies of man.... Hepatitis, although an almost 'pure' example of progress by the study of man, is by no

Review Essay: Recent Chicano Writing

Review Essay: Recent Chicano Writing Raymund A. Paredes University of California Los Angeles Chicano (or Mexican American — I use the terms interchangeably) writing has grown remarkably since 1965 when Luis Valdez yoked his considerable playwrighting talents to the cause of César Chavez's farmworkers' union and launched a literary movement . The publication of a novel or a collection of short stories or poems is no longer a rare event; indeed, two publishing houses, Arte Público Press of Houston and the Bilingual Press of Tempe, Arizona, seem to be flourishing by specializing in just such works. Some Chicano writers, Gary Soto for example, have acquired national reputations while others, most notably Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, have won prestigious literary awards in Latin America. This surge in creative activity has been accompanied by a rise in literary criticism. In the past year, two ambitious studies have appeared: Marta Sanchez's Contemporary Chicana Poetry (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985) and Cordelia Candelaria's Chicano Poetry (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood, 1986). One of the most gratifying developments in Chicano writing recently has been the expansion of its ideological perspectives. Always innovative in its structural and linguistic features, Chicano writing, especially in the first decade of its emergence, often verged close to predictability in its presentation of the social, cultural, and economic circumstances of Chicano life. This quality was not surprising, given that Chicano writing initially evolved in a highly charged political context and that authors felt obligated to promote a program of social reform and cultural preservation. That Chicano writers as a group no longer felt bound to a particular political and ideological agenda became clear in 1981 when Richard Rodriguez assailed bilingual education and affirmative action programs in his autobiographical Hunger ofMemory, much to the astonishment of numerous Anglo reviewers who lavished praise on the book in journals ranging from the New York Times Book Review to People magazine. The continued diversity of current Chicano writing, ideological and otherwise, is evident in works that have recently appeared. Of all the works under review here, Lionel Garcia's Leaving Home is the most predictable and the least satisfying. The novel traces the experiences of several Mexican Americans who live in California just before and during World War II. Like José Antonio Villarreal and Rudolfo Anaya before him, Garcia focuses on this period as a watershed for Mexican Americans, a time when their patriotic feelings turned irrevocably away from Mexico and they found themselves involved in the central events of American Ufe. Leaving Home is that most typical of American ethnic works: the generational novel of conflict, acculturation, and, inevitably so it seems, assimilation . Garcia is an ambitious writer; he has in mind nothing less than a Mexican American epic, a chronicle of ethnogenesis (to use Werner Sollors' term) that delineates the development of Mexican American culture and character. Unfortunately, Garcia's achievement falls short of his ambition. First, the novel is ineptly written, occasionally to the point of unintended humor. No editor seems to have glanced at the manuscript. Garcia writes that sweaters are "hanged" on 124 Book Reviews125 clotheslines and that a character "had drank too much." A female character has skin that "was smooth, though wrinkled and very pale" while a male character, we are told, is "mostly in a bad mood all the time." In addition to his grammatical and logical errors, Garcia develops his plot clumsily. Characters come and go and reappear improbably. And both major characters are flat and hardly more than conveyances for Garcia's careless observations about Mexican American experience. Garcia seems to have learned much of what he believes about Mexican Americans from John Steinbeck. Many of Garcia's characters resemble thepaisanos of Tortilla Flat, stupendously ignorant and complacent, unconcerned about pulUng themselves out of their cultural muck. Garcia connects their behavior to the long history of bigotry against Mexican Americans in California but much too weakly to mitigate the novel's portrayal of Mexican American culture as inherently and severely pathological. The uninformed reader might conclude from Garcia's work that Chícanos deserve every act of malfeasance directed at them by Anglo society and that assimilation is the only remedy for the scourge...

The Thucydidean Tragic View: The Moral Implications

No Greek of any calibre, at least in the fifth century, could remain intellectually or spiritually altogether unconditioned by a conscious feeling for, or awareness of, the tragic in human affairs. His poetry and his art, indeed his history, were saturated with the idea of the tragic. Thucydides is certainly no exception, and the most uninformed reader of his History will come away from the work with a keen sense of the immediately perceptible tragic coloration with which it is permeated. Interpreted from any leading, unifying thematic idea the explanation of Thucydides' work must include as central and dominant the tragic deterioration of Athens from the Periclean ideals so well expressed in the Funeral Oration, through the nadir of cynicism and moral decline of the Melian Dialogue, to the utter demoralization expressed through the catastrophe of the Sicilian campaign and its aftermath. One has merely to examine the obvious and purposefully wrought antitheses throughout the History to determine the dramatic nature of Thucydides' work. The drastic metamorphosis in Athenian character that occurs between Books One and Five, for instance, points up such a tragic contrast. The Athenians of the first assembly at Sparta claim that they more than any others were the saviors of Hellas (1.74.2), fearless and self-sacrificing in the common cause of all allies, that they acted with sagacity of judgement (1.75.1), that the empire had not been acquired by force (1.75.2) but by necessity of circumstances, that they had been more observant of justice than actually required, the overwhelming balance of power being in their favor (1.76.3), that in the courts in Athens suits of allies are judged under the same laws (1.77.1). If we compare these same Athenians with the Athenians of the Melian Dialogue it becomes abundantly clear that a deterioration of character and moral standards has taken place and that Thucydides has linked the moral with the tragic. The earlier Athenians, in spite of their desire for imperial expansion, were at least concerned with a minimum of justice and fair play in their international dealings. The Athenians of the Melian Dialogue do not even make a pretence of upholding the commonly accepted nomoi which had from time immemorial been established among men to protect the weaker. Thucydides' strong editorial statements on the effects of anomia (‘lawlessness’) during and following the plague (2.52-53), and during the stasis on Corcyra (3.81ff.) also make firm the link between the moral and the tragic.

The New Astronomy

Nigel Henbest and Michael Marten 1983 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 240 pp price £12.50 ISBN 0 521 25683 6 Pictures selected by Marten and text by Henbest combine to give the uninformed reader a glimpse of the new information from space available at frequencies beyond the visible spectrum. Radio, infrared, ultraviolet, x- and gamma-ray data are processed into full colour 'photographs' which give a new perspective on both familiar and unfamiliar astronomical objects.

A Modest Protocol

O n September 27, 1978, the director of a major government research institute called for an extraordinary experiment. Arthur C. Upton, head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), approved a clinical trial for the controversial anti-cancer drug, Laetrile. The uninformed reader might well interpret this decision as a routine health policy judgment based upon the usual clinical criteria for testing potential anti-tumor agents. Some background is necessary to correct this misapprehension and thus assure a proper appreciation of the broadened perspectives that have encouraged NCI to move beyond the limits of traditional medical research.

Cadmium: Biological Effects and Occurrence in the Environment

It is only in recent years that there has been concern with cadmium as an environmental contaminant. A very large literature on cadmium has appeared in the past few years. Much of it has appeared in abstract form, in conference reports, or project reports. Several comprehensive reviews have appeared in the past three years covering virtually all aspects of the subject. One of the objectives of this review is to direct the uninformed reader to these sources of information. Another will be to discuss a few selected aspects of current research on cadmium, especially as it relates to sources in the environment. 85 references.

Brain Control: A Critical Examination of Brain Stimulation and Psychosurgery

The book is best when dealing with laboratory studies, since the author was a behavioral physiologist. The inquisitive reader will find here an introduction to the whole field of electrical stimulation in animals and in man. Dr. Valenstein's comments will help him realize that this field has been harvested by individuals of widely ranging experience, precision, self-criticism, and enthusiasm. The clinical sections are decidedly weaker. Few neurosurgeons will understand the inclusion of the surgical treatment of involuntary movement, epilepsy, and pain under the heading of psychosurgery, which is the surgical treatment of psychiatric illness. Few will agree with the cursory review given these subjects in which the dangers and uncertainties are emphasized without recognition of the happiness experienced by those patients who have thrown off their dyskinesia, their epilepsy, or their intractable pain. The sections on psychosurgery itself receive a more adequate treatment, but the uninformed reader might emerge from

Report on selected readings on digital computer simulation

The title of this text immediately reveals who it is written for: architects who are interested in computer applications. The author is assuming that the general reader in the field of architecture has absolutely no background in the field of computing and the text is therefore written on a very low level of sophistication, at which the simplicity is exaggerated. Though the text as a whole is probably helpful for an uninformed reader to learn about applications of computers to architecture, a more sophisticated reader will find reading of all but a few sections a waste of time. For a person with specific interests in the field of architecture and computer applications, those few more successful parts are probably quite worth reading, if for nothing else, then just for exposure to what is actually being done in that area. Besides that, an uninformed reader may find it interesting to get exposure to British hardware and ALGOL-based programming practice, as well as British terminology.

Doctors and Overpopulation

Dr. J.A.D. Anderson and others (January 8 p. 108) although apparently genuinely concerned about possible pressures give the impression of having been misled by the report of the Select Committee on Science and Technology. Though it is true that the Committee concluded that the country was overpopulated this was at variance with the opinion of the majority of the expert witnesses examined most of whom could find no evidence for the recommendation of control and it remains unexplained how the Committee came to its extraoridnary conclusion. I recommend this report to your readers who will then realize that no Government reading the full report could possibly endorse the Committees proposals. The letter contains other statements likely to arouse panic in the uninformed reader. How can they possibly write of sheer overcrowding in cities with its attendant when the latest Census returns show that nearly all the conurbations experienced a decline in from 1961 to 1971. At the same time massive efforts have been made to combat pollution which in certain aspects such as smoke and sewage control has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years; this subject has been reviewed by Mellanby who claims that the prospects for successful pollution control even with a greatly increased population are good. Doctors have an important duty to promote responsible parenthood but it is not part of that duty to engender guilt in those parents who in normal exercise of their marriage rights have a size of family in excess of an artifically contrived norm.(FULL TEXT)

Repair and Regeneration: The Scientific Basis for Surgical Practice

The original three-day symposium, of which this book is the published record, was probably instructive and memorable. However, published symposia generally lack the clarity of presentation found in textbooks and the oratorical power that accompanied delivery. Editors generally fail to request their contributors to adapt their materials into a form suitable for a book. Some reduction in the quantity of data seems desirable to make the whole more easily understood as well as to reduce the high price. The book includes discussions of bacterial inflammation and immunology, biological factors in skin repair, formation and repair of connective tissue, wound healing and remodeling, and some clinical aspects of wounds. Several thrills await the industrious uninformed reader. The principles of induction, scar contraction, and wound nutrition stand out. The enigma of the genesis of wound healing becomes somewhat clearer with the evidence of Bullough on chalones and of Grobstein on interactions between