americana - amerikaner
A melancholy man subject to depression, he entertained friends and strangers alike with a limitless fund of humorous stories and apt anecdotes. Awkward with women, he experienced many ups and downs [...] A man of generous instincts toward political adversaries who famously called for "malice towards none" in his second inaugural address, he had also written many anonymous newspaper articles cruelly satirizing opponents in his early career. [...] Gregarious and a good listener, he had few close friends and made his most important presidential decisions in lonely contemplation.
James McPherson, "Lincoln off his pedestal" in NYRB, Vol. LVI, Number 14, p.58
Labels: NYRB
File 1.91
Talking back to Prozac:The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorderby Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, Oxford University Press, 287 pp.
Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
by Christopher Lane, Yale University Press, 263 pp.
Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression
by David Healy, New York University Press, 351 pp.
"The corporate giants popularly known as Big Pharma spend annually, worldwide,some $25 billion on marketing, and they employ more Washington lobbyists than there are legislators. Their power, in relation to all of the forces that might oppose their will, is so disproportionately huge that they can dictate how they are to be (lightly) regulated, shape much of the medical research agenda, spin the findings in their favor, conceal incriminating data, co-opt their potential critics, and insidiously colonize both our doctors' minds and our own. [...]
As a psychopharmacologist, however, he saw from the outset that the drug firms were pushing a simplistic "biobabble" myth whereby depression supposedly results straightforwardly from a shortfall of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. No such causation has been established, and the proposal is no more reasonable than claiming that headaches arise from aspirin deprivation"
in
NYRB Labels: NYRB
he was a carpenter
When we think of the young Evelyn Waugh the image immediately conjured is that of a Twenties swell, brightest of the Bright Young Things, racketing about Oxford and London with the likes of Harold Acton and Brian Howard, knocking off policemen's helmets and permanently tight on champagne. It is somewhat startling, then, to come upon the fact that in 1927 he enrolled in a carpentry course at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Bloomsbury. He was then aged twenty-four and at a loss about what to do with his life [...]
J. Banville, 'The Family Pinfold',
NYRB 54:11 June 28 2007.
Labels: NYRB
