Prescriptions for the mind : a critical view of contemporary psychiatry
By Joel Paris
New York : Oxford University Press, 2008.
Call# RC437.5 .P37 2008

From Oxford University Press:

“The practice of psychiatry has undergone great changes in recent years. In this book, Joel Paris, MD, a veteran psychiatrist, provides a fluently written and accessible “state-of-the-field” assessment. Himself a clinician, researcher, and teacher, Paris focuses on the most striking change within the field – the diverging roles of psychopharmacology and psychotherapy in contemporary practice. Where once psychiatrists were trained in Freudian psychoanalysis – which involved, more than anything else, talking – current pressures in mental health practice, including those imposed by managed care, are leading psychiatrists to treat more and more of their patients exclusively with medication, which is cheaper and faster. At the same time, psychotherapy is increasingly not being taught to new psychiatrists-in-training, even though, as Paris reveals, there is scientific evidence that both talk therapies and medication can play an important role in the treatment of mental illness. These developments are occuring against a backdrop of exploding research in the genetics and neurobiology of mental illness that will continue to drive the field. Paris ends by contemplating how going forward psychiatry can best respond to all these forces and proposes a team-based approach to mental health care. The book will appeal both to specialists and nonspecialists, particularly psychiatric residents and fellows, medical students considering specialization in psychiatry, clinical psychologists, social workers, and general readers, especially consumers of mental health services.”

Psychotherapy and the quest for happiness
By Emmy Van Deurzen
Los Angeles : SAGE, 2009.
Call# RC437.5 .V36 2009

From SAGE:

“The unspoken yearning that brings people to therapy is often that of a desperate desire for happiness. Should therapists ignore this desire, interpret it or challenge it? And what does our preoccupation with happiness tell us about contemporary culture and the role of the therapist?

In this book, Emmy van Deurzen addresses the taboo subject of the moral role of psychotherapists and counsellors. Asking when and why we decided that the aim of life is to be happy, she poses searching questions about the meaning of life. Psychotherapy and the Quest for Happiness seeks to define what a good life consists of and how therapists might help their clients to live well rather than just in search of happiness.

This text makes stimulating reading for all trainee and practising counsellors and psychotherapists, especially those interested in the existential approach.”

Philosophical issues in psychiatry : explanation, phenomenology, and nosology
By Kenneth S. Kendler
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Call# RC437.5 .P4355 2008

From Johns Hopkins University Press:

“This multidisciplinary collection explores three key concepts underpinning psychiatry — explanation, phenomenology, and nosology — and their continuing relevance in an age of neuroimaging and genetic analysis.

An introduction by Kenneth S. Kendler lays out the philosophical grounding of psychiatric practice. The first section addresses the concept of explanation, from the difficulties in describing complex behavior to the categorization of psychological and biological causality. In the second section, contributors discuss experience, including the complex and vexing issue of how self—agency and free will affect mental health. The third and final section examines the organizational difficulties in psychiatric nosology and the instability of the existing diagnostic system. Each chapter has both an introduction by the editors and a concluding comment by another of the book’s contributors.”

Clinical management of sensorimotor speech disorders
By Malcolm Ray McNeil
New York : Thieme, 2009.
Call#: RC424.7 .C576 2009

From Thieme Medical Publishers:

“Bringing together the expertise of leading research practitioners in the field, the second edition of Clinical Management of Sensorimotor Speech Disorders is an up-to-date reference for the underlying theory and the basic principles of assessment and treatment. This book provides a solid foundation in the conceptual framework essential for classifying and differentiating disorders according to clinical categories. It covers the theory underlying measurement strategies including acoustic, kinematic, aerodynamic, and electromyographic techniques, and guides the reader through treatments for each disorder.

New in this edition is a comprehensive section with in-depth coverage of the diseases, syndromes, and pathologic conditions which are accompanied by sensorimotor speech disorders. These chapters provide concise descriptions of the disease and its signs and symptoms, neuropathology, epidemiology, and etiology. Each chapter goes on to present the speech impairment associated with the disorder and its signs and symptoms, etiology, neuropathology, associated cognitive, linguistic, and communicative signs and symptoms, special diagnostic considerations, treatment, and key references.

Features:

• Clear articulation of theoretical issues provides a strong foundation for the clinical management of the dysarthrias, apraxia, and speech problems secondary to hearing loss
• New chapter on neurogenic fluency disorders
• Extensive discussion of neuropathologic conditions that cause sensorimotor speech disorders

Authoritative and comprehensive, this expanded edition will prove to be the reference of choice for students in speech-language pathology programs as well as clinicians and researchers.”

Contemporary issues in mental health nursing
by Jonathon E. Lynch
Hoboken, NJ : J. Wiley, 2008.
Call#: RC440 .C584 2008

From Wiley:

“Contemporary Issues in Mental Health Nursing provides a series of essays which critique and comment on the current standing of the profession and addresses some of the post prominent issues and themes in the field today.

Divided into three principal sections, this text first explores professional and political issues in mental health nursing, including change and developing practice, emotional labour and evidence-based practice. The second section looks at clinical issues such as primary mental health promotion, medication management, self-neglect, promoting recovery and multidisciplinary working. Section three focuses on risk and mental health nursing practice. A final chapter explores the future, highlighting areas of strength and matters which the profession is likely to be required to develop in the near future.

Offering thoughtful, critical coverage of some of the key issues, Contemporary Issues in Mental Health Nursing is a comprehensive and valuable text for all involved in mental health care.”

Nature’s beloved son : rediscovering John Muir’s botanical legacy
by Bonnie Johanna Gisel
Berkeley, Calif. : Heyday Books, 2008.

Call# QH31 .M78 G57 2008

From Heydey Books:

Stunned into awe by the orchid Calypso borealis, John Muir wrote: “I never before saw a plant so full of life, so perfectly spiritual, it seemed pure enough for the throne of its Creator.”

Muir was blessed throughout his life with a love of plants. He tucked away interesting specimens from wherever he traveled, sent them to herbariums all over the country, and wrote passionately of them to friends and colleagues. Skilled in the technical aspects of botany, Muir also found in plants “pleasure so deep, so pure, so endless.” The revelatory beauty of plants provided inspiration that suffused his career as a writer, adventurer, and environmental advocate.

In this opulently produced book, photographer Stephen J. Joseph presents images of plants collected directly by Muir, while scholar Bonnie J. Gisel richly lays before us the life and words of a man at once familiar and surprising, a towering figure forever smitten with “nature’s irresistible, divine beauty.”

“Good observers of nature” : American women and the scientific study of the natural world, 1820-1885
by Tina Gianquitto
Athens : University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Call# QH26 .G53 2007

From the University of Georgia Press:

“In “Good Observers of Nature” Tina Gianquitto examines nineteenth-century American women’s intellectual and aesthetic experiences of nature and investigates the linguistic, perceptual, and scientific systems that were available to women to describe those experiences.

Many women writers of this period used the natural world as a platform for discussing issues of domesticity, education, and the nation. To what extent, asks Gianquitto, did these writers challenge the prevalent sentimental narrative modes (like those used in the popular flower language books) and use scientific terminology to describe the world around them? The book maps the intersections of the main historical and narrative trajectories that inform the answer to this question: the changing literary representations of the natural world in texts produced by women from the 1820s to the 1880s and the developments in science from the Enlightenment to the advent of evolutionary biology. Though Gianquitto considers a range of women’s nature writing (botanical manuals, plant catalogs, travel narratives, seasonal journals, scientific essays), she focuses on four writers and their most influential works: Almira Phelps (Familiar Lectures on Botany, 1829), Margaret Fuller (Summer on the Lakes, in 1843), Susan Fenimore Cooper (Rural Hours, 1850), and Mary Treat (Home Studies in Nature, 1885).

From these writings emerges a set of common concerns about the interaction of reason and emotion in the study of nature, the best vocabularies for representing objects in nature (local, scientific, or moral), and the competing systems for ordering the natural world (theological, taxonomic, or aesthetic). This is an illuminating study about the culturally assumed relationship between women, morality, and science.”

Why Evolution is True
by Jerry A. Coyne
New York : Viking, 2009.

Call# QH366.2 .C74 2009

From Viking:

“In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant “intelligent design,” there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned—the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection. Even Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, while extolling the beauty of evolution and examining case studies, have not focused on the evidence itself. Yet the proof is vast, varied, and magnificent, drawn from many different fields of science. Scientists are observing species splitting into two and are finding more and more fossils capturing change in the past—dinosaurs that have sprouted feathers, fish that have grown limbs.

Why Evolution Is True weaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, paleontology, geology, molecular biology, and anatomy that demonstrate the “indelible stamp” of the processes first proposed by Darwin. In crisp, lucid prose accessible to a wide audience, Why Evolution Is True dispels common misunderstandings and fears about evolution and clearly confirms that this amazing process of change has been firmly established as a scientific truth.”