Book Review

Julia Lewis    
12/17/2008
Book Commentary

The Schopenhauer Cure by Irving D. Yalom, chronicles the extraordinary last year of a therapy group.  Descriptions of the therapy sessions form a significant portion of the novel, complete with copious amounts of dialogue between group members.  These interactions are reported to the reader by the therapist, Julius Hertzfeld.  It is fascinating as the reader to witness the thoughts of therapist and consider how his own conscious and unconscious are responding to the patient. 

 

Mary Stokes

Bio 245: Mental Health and the Brain

10 December 2008

Book Commentary: On Oliver Sacks’s Migraine, the Brain, and Mental Health

 

For my book commentary I read Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen. The book is about Susanna Kaysen when she was eighteen years old, and institutionalized, and spans to her life after the institution. She recounts how she got to the institution, what it was like in the institution, and reveals her thoughts about the world and various theories. The book portrays vivid portraits of the world she enters, and of the world she left. Kaysen is clear and precise, making the reader question what the difference is between the “sane” and the “insane”, between her and you?

Anna Melker

Food For Thought CSem Fall 2008

Frugal Winter

Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey Through Schizophrenia by Pamela Spiro Wagner and Carolyn S. Spiro, M.D., St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2005

 

Dawn Hathaway

October 3, 2008

Critical Feminist Studies: An Introduction

Professor Anne Dalke

Is Middlesex an Appropriate Queer Studies Text?

Frans de Waal’s Primates and Philosophers is an intriguing exploration of animal and human behavior, and a fierce attempt to link them intrinsically and inseparably.  De Waal attacks the notion that morality is a uniquely human trait – opposing those who believe that homo sapiens is a loner in ethics, and that our species rose magnificent out of the barbaric and uncomplicated ashes of our ancestors.