Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Hardcover)
by Charles Barber
Hardcover $24.95 – 10%
Public perceptions of mental health issues have changed dramatically over the last fifteen years, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the rampant overmedication of ordinary Americans. In 2006, 227 million antidepressant prescriptions were dispensed in the United States, more than any other class of medication; in that same year, the United States accounted for 66 percent of the global antidepressant market. In Comfortably Numb, Charles Barber provides a much-needed context for this disturbing phenomenon.
Barber explores the ways in which pharmaceutical companies first create the need for a drug and then rush to fill it, and he reveals that the increasing pressure Americans are under to medicate themselves (direct-to-consumer advertising, fewer nondrug therapeutic options, the promise of the quick fix, the blurring of distinction between mental illness and everyday problems). Most importantly, he convincingly argues that without an industry to promote them, non-pharmaceutical approaches that could have the potential to help millions are tragically overlooked by a nation that sees drugs as an instant cure for all emotional difficulties.
Here is an unprecedented account of the impact of psychiatric medications on American culture and on Americans themselves.
Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones
by Robert Greenfield
Paperback $16.00
Greenfield focuses on the early post-Jones era, when Jagger and Richards were esteemed songwriters, and the band was starting to make money in piles. Picking up approximately where his S.T.P.: A Journey through America with the Rolling Stones (1974) left off, he recounts happenings at Richards’ French villa, where the album Exile on Main Street was recorded in summer 1971. Jagger, having recently dumped Marianne Faithfull, was married to jet-setting Bianca, whose antipathy for Richards and cohorts was reciprocated. Richards was in the middle of a long liaison with dissolute actress, scenester, and Faithfull-friend Anita Pallenberg. The Stones had extricated themselves from manager Allen Klein and, thanks to Jagger’s banker buddy Prince Rupert Lowenstein, were about to begin self-marketing. Complicating things were Richards’, Pallenberg’s, and assorted resident playmates’ heroin addiction, which brought Corsican drug dealers, local scumbags, and sleazoid Richards factotum Spanish Tony Sanchez into the mix, so to speak. Greenfield merrily corrects Sanchez’s and others’ published misstatements and serves up such treats as Richards’ description of Jagger as several of the nicest guys one could hope to meet. Rough, raw, and ironic by turns, he lays down the facts of how heroin enslaved and immobilized the band at a time when everything seemed within its grasp. So doing, this wry depiction of a dark, decadent moment in rock history inspires a certain demented nostalgia.
Granta 100Â
Paperback $14.95
Guest-edited by novelist William Boyd.
Contents:
William Boyd, Introduction
Jayne Anne Phillips, Solly and Lark
Harold Pinter, Poem
James Fenton, On Buying a Clavichord
Carolin Seeliger/ Tobias Wenzel, My Question for Myself
Craig Raine, How Snow Falls
Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You
Mario Vargas Llosa, Three Character Sketches
Jamie McKendrick, From the Flood Plain
Helen Simpson, In-flight Entertainment
Alice Oswald, Eel Tail
Ian Jack, The Serampur Scotch
Ian McEwan, For You
Martin Amis, The Unknown Known
Bruce Frankel, Turn of the Century
Lucy Eyre, Human Safari
Alan Hollinghurst, Highlights
Ashley Capps, Jewelweed
Doris Lessing, Chicken and Eggs
Michael Hofmann, End of the Pier Show
Isabel Hilton, Greenland
Tash Aw, To the City
Don Paterson, The Swing
Salman Rushdie, Heraclitus
Nicholas Shakespeare, The White Hole of Bombay
Lavinia Greenlaw, The Joy of Difficulty
Ingo Schulze, Estonia, Out in the Country
Oliver Reynolds, 17 Melbourne Road
Julian Barnes, Marriage Lines
A. M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven
Helen Oyeyemi, pie-kah
Derek Mahon, Somewhere the Wave
The Art of the Poetic Line
by James Longenbach
Paperback $12.00
The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature’ s finest practioners. Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. James Longenbach opens this provocative book with that essential statement. Through a range of examples– from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery and Glu ck– Longenbach describes the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. The Art of the Poetic Line is a vital new resource by one of America’ s most important critics and most engaging poets.
Perverted by Language: Fiction Inspired by the FallÂ
Edited by Peter Wild
Paperback $15.00
Mechanical ducks, shark women that taste of licorice, perverted sexual shenanigans in cramped office spaces, double-crossing Nazi apologists, bald-headed cultural subversives, and celebrity deer-culling-this is the wonderful and frightening world of Perverted by Language. Twenty-three writers choose a song by The Fall and use it as inspiration for a short story.
Contributors include: Steve Aylett, Matt Beaumont, Nicholas Blincoe, Clare Dudman, Richard Evans, Michel Faber, Niall Griffiths, Andrew Holmes, Mick Jackson, Nick Johnstone, Stewart Lee, Kevin MacNeil, Carlton Mellick III, Rebbecca Ray, Nicholas Royle, Matthew David Scott, Stav Sherez, Mark E Smith, Nick Stone, Matt Thorne, Jeff VanderMeer, Helen Walsh, and John Williams.
The Curious Gardener’s Almanac: Centuries of Practical Garden Wisdom
by Niall Edworthy
$16.95
A delightful anthology of curiosities that honors the gardening life.
Celebrating the garden in all its splendid diversity and rich history, this collection of facts, ancient wisdom and customs, tips, and recipes features more than 1,000 entries-remarkable information about flowers, vegetables, fruits, trees, herbs, insects, birds, water, soil, tools, composts, climate, gardens and gardeners, myths, superstitions, and biodynamics.
Woven into this wealth of knowledge are famous quotations, anecdotes, traditional sayings, lines of verse, and words of rural wisdom. It’s a wonderful gift for any gardener, whether they’re tending a window box or a full-fledged farm.
A Fighter’s Heart: One Man’s Journey Through the World of Fighting
by Sam Sheridan
Paperback $14.00
In 1999, after a series of wildly adventurous jobs around the world, Sam Sheridan found himself in Australia, loaded with cash and intent on not working until he’d spent it all. It occurred to him that, without distractions, he could finally indulge a long-dormant obsession: fighting. Within a year, he was in Bangkok training with the greatest fighter in muay Thai (Thai kickboxing) history and stepping through the ropes for a professional bout. That one fight wasn’t enough. Sheridan set out to test himself on an epic journey into how and why we fight, facing Olympic boxers, Brazilian jiu-jitsu stars, and Ultimate Fighting champions. Along the way, Sheridan delivers an insightful look at violence as a career and a spectator sport, a behind-the-pageantry glimpse of athletes at the top of their terrifying game. An extraordinary combination of gonzo journalism and participatory sports writing, A Fighter’s Heart is a dizzying first-hand account of what it’s like to reach the peak of finely disciplined personal aggression, to hit—and be hit.
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