BOOKSHELF

Spring 1996 Volume 5, Number 2

MEMORY DISTORTION: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past. Daniel Schacter, editor; preface by Gerald Fischbach and Joseph Coyle. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1996. 400 pp., $49.95) For the serious student of issues in personal or societal life that may be illuminated by understanding better how the brain works -- in this case, memory. Leading scholars and neuroscientists explore issues such as repressed memory, hypnosis and suggestion, post traumatic stress disorder, effects of anxiety and depression, and distortion in societies' collective historical memory. The book is based on a mid-1994 conference convened by the Harvard Center for the Study of Mind, Brain and Behavior.

THE CLOCK OF AGES: Why We Age, How We Age, Winding Back the Clock by John J. Medina. (Cambridge University Press, England, 1996. 325 pp. $24.95) Medina, a University of Washington molecular biologist, gives just two chapters of his book to the brain and nervous system, but many of the biological events he describes for other body organs and functions take place in the brain as well. With a real facility for putting science in plain English, and the well-timed pun (one section title is "Muscle Sprouts," another, "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow"), this one is for anybody interested in aging.

DOSE OF SANITY: Mind, Medicine and Misdiagnosis by Sydney Walker, III, M.D. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., NY, 1996. 248 pp. $19.95) The author, a neurologist and psychiatrist, warns psychiatrists and patients about what he sees as over-reliance on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the mental health profession's formal compilation of mental disorders, symptoms and treatments. Walker castigates "cookbook" diagnoses of mental disorders based on the DSM, especially those for which drugs are the primary treatment, and contends that practitioners are giving dangerously little attention to the possible association of physical illness such as tumors, diabetes, and cardiac disease.

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