New in Paperback
Better Living Through Science
Sunday, January 7, 2007; Page BW12
By Rebecca Lemov
Hill and Wang. 291 pp. $16
  (Istockphoto) |
Here's a frightening idea: "If one could quantify and control the internal arena of the personal self -- its urges and wants, its worries and fears -- then the running of a modern society would require less brute external force." In other words, we'd all be safe but somehow sedated. This idea, as Rebecca Lemov demonstrates, powered a lucrative field of social science research called human engineering during the first half of the 20th century. These human engineers "set about building tiny labyrinths, small-scale social situations, miniature restraining devices, and microcosmical dioramas of real life where test animals grappled in conditions simulating war, competition, or self-doubt." And then they moved from lab rats to people, doing "experiments on human subjects that combined drugs, psychosurgery, and other alarming manipulations." Many of their techniques have since been discredited, but the ramifications, Lemov writes, can be found in "the intelligence test, the SAT, the opinion survey, the early poll . . . the propaganda campaign, the anthropological databank . . . the focus group, and the most effective methods of coercive interrogation."
Generation Rx How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies
By Greg Critser
Mariner. 308 pp. $14.95
America has become a vast lab for pharmaceutical experimentation, argues Greg Critser. Almost half of all Americans take at least one prescription drug each day. "The expectation is that pills can and will do everything, from guarding us against our excesses of drink, food, and tobacco, to increasing our children's performance at school, to jump-starting our own productivity at work, to extending our very time on this mortal coil," writes Critser. But the big question is whether "our bodies, our pocketbooks, and our democratic institutions [can] bear their cumulative cost." Critser thinks not: For one thing, "serious adverse drug reactions . . . are now among the top ten causes of death in the United States. And that does not include deaths from overdose, drug abuse, or noncompliance." Patients are not entirely innocent victims, though: "Prescription drugs have become a way of delaying premature death without dealing with the underlying soul and body sickness of modern life and modern life choices."
Physical: An American Checkup
By James McManus
Picador. 257 pp. $14
"I used to be confident that what's called Western medicine was riding full speed, or almost that fast, to the rescue," writes James McManus in Physical. That changed with his son's death by drug overdose in a mental institution. "At least two pharmaceutical companies who made antidepressants prescribed for him . . . had lied about data suggesting links between their drugs and suicide in teenagers," writes McManus. "Executing by hand the persons who manipulated the data and made the decision to keep pushing those antidepressants wouldn't [bring his child back], either, though I'd still love to do it." But his son's death, his father and his grandfather's early fatal heart attacks, his brother's deadly leukemia and his daughter's diabetes prodded him to ponder his own mortality. So when the editor of Harper's offered him a chance to undergo the Mayo Clinic's "executive physical" (all expenses paid), he said yes, with trepidation. "Accepting this plummy assignment would more or less guarantee I'd be told things I did not want to hear," he writes. And he was, but he uses his fancy physical to idiosyncratically explore the state of the American health system.
From Our Previous Reviews
· Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother (Random House, $14.95), Sonia Nazario's true tale of a 16-year-old who travels alone from Honduras to the United States, is "among the best border books yet written," according to Luis Alberto Urrea.
· "What elevates [Martha Sherrill's] The Ruins of California (Riverhead, $14) from a fine novel to a unique work of art," wrote Carolyn See, "is the compassionate, intelligent portrait of a certain kind of boy-man, utterly starved for fun and beauty."
· The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca (Bantam, $13), Tahir Shah's "highly readable account of moving his young family to Casablanca" looks like other "modern Mediterranean fairy tales," but it isn't, wrote Jason Goodwin. It is "constructed with something weirder and sharper: vinegar, perhaps, and ectoplasm."
Rachel Hartigan Shea is a contributing editor of Book World.
