Blogroll

When psychiatry came to the Hundred Acre Wood

Twenty years ago five Canadian specialists in pediatric neurodevelopment explored Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood. They discovered “Seriously Troubled Individuals,” many meeting the criteria for significant mental disorders.

Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh, and friends first appeared in stories by A.A. Milne in the late 1920s. In 1961, five years after Milne’s death, Walt […]

Unintended rereading

As a general rule, I don’t reread books. Especially with books I really liked, I’m afraid reading them again might detract from my initial enjoyment. I also figure rereading is a missed opportunity to read something “new.” In 2019, though, I reread six books, more than half of all the books I reread in the […]

Reading in Trump’s American dystopia

For a voracious reader like me, retirement should be close to nirvana. In fact, before I retired at the end of 2016 I had a magnet on a file cabinet in my office saying, “Born to Read, Forced to Work.” And a self-imposed COVID lockdown should add even more time for reading. Yet as the […]

The book that didn’t exist — until hundreds asked for it

Trump supporters on Reddit last week tried, but failed, to keep Hillary Clinton’s new book from reaching No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller lists. It wasn’t the first time an effort by a group of people affected the book industry. Perhaps the most interesting one, though, involved demand for a book that didn’t exist.

Jean Shepherd […]

It’s Bookmas season

As my kids have told me for years, I’m a hard person to buy presents for. That’s in part due to my varying and often eclectic tastes. But a bigger reason is that for items that are probably $50 or less, I have no hesitancy in buying the things in which I’m most interested. That […]