Madness and Civilization explores two major canonical events in the transition from medieval to modern social structures. The first is the differentiation of criminals, paupers, and the insane. The second is the relationship between the insane and the agency responsible for treating them. However, in typical Foucaultian style the book elliptically skips around these main topics, instead focusing on 18th century nosgraphies between hysteria and mania and melancholia, and the various humoral theories that underlay those now entirely discredited theories. The closing thoughts, the idea that the psychiatrist is essentially a moral shaman, and that madness serves as the dark mirror to enlightment rationality, lack the scholarly hitting power of the Panopticon or Biopower. So far, the least essential Foucault I've read.

Well, this is certainly a book. I can't say much more, due to the elliptical multi-narrators stream of consciousness style, but it's about Black faith healers somewhere in the South, and um, something happens, I don't know what. Guess my Patriarchy Pants are just on too tight.

Szasz makes a frontal assault on the power of psychiatry, arguing that mental illness is a myth and that the power accorded to psychiatrists to decide if people are legally responsible for their actions, have them committed to hospitals, and prescribe various psychotropic medications is fundamentally misfounded. The basic premise of his argument is that only organs can be sick, and the mind is not an organ. Rather, what we see as mental illness are the results of rule-breaking behavior by "mentally ill" people, an attempt to game their social interactions to receive the socially beneficial role of a "sick person" as accorded by Judeo-Christian morality and modern standards of care.

While there is some benefit to challenging the hegemony of mental illness (a recent paper says "Almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year."), Szasz's argument fails on two major grounds.

The first is modern understanding that cognitive events are linked to neurological events, or in other words, that mental illness are in some way brain disorders. We can draw a spectrum from something totally neurological--Parkinson's disease, to something totally psychological--Borderline Personality Disorder, say, and put things like schizophrenia, depression, bipolar, and their related pharmacological treatments and neurological origins somewhere between them. It's unfair to hold a book published in the late 1960s to modern beliefs, but again, Szasz doesn't have much to say about this.

The second problem is more damning: even if we accept Szasz's belief that the mentally ill are just playing the game of life by different rules, what is to be done with them? As any good historian of mental illness knows, the lines between insane, criminal, and sinful are far from clear. Psychiatry is the modern way of dealing with malcontents, of offering a source of power and authority that people can draw on to change their lives and social behaviors. Szasz might be right in his argument that psychiatry probably isn't medicine, and it certainly isn't science, but he doesn't engage with the notion that psychiatry is something, and that it performs a socially necessary role. Rather than assailing psychiatry as an evil system of fraud that makes people crazy, we must ask how unhappy people can be helped, how their complex problems can be untangled, and what resources are necessary for that to happen.

You ever fought a war for so long that you can't even imagine what the end would look like? This book is something like that. Peter Conrad was one of the first scholars to study medicalization, starting in the 1970s with ADHD. This book builds on his more than three decades of research in the field, and the detailed sources are by far its strongest accomplishment. However, Conrad has lost the distance necessary to take a neutral look at the complex phenomena he describes.

Medicalization is the process by which something becomes defined as a medical problem, rather than a social, criminal, or moral failure, or simply a delusion. As such, it is entirely about the definition and boundaries of illness, and the responsibilities for health allocated to doctors, patients, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical researchers. From Conrad's perspective, medicalization has advanced on all fronts, claiming new territory. The problem with medicalization is that it reduces the diversity of human existence to "normal" and a series of pathologies, and that it is being carried out by pharmaceutical companies which stand to benefit from new diseases and drugs.

I don't disagree with these complaints, but if medicalization is really a question about definitions, responsibility, and values, then we need to step back and examine the ways in which diseases are defined, the consequences of holding various stakeholders responsible, and what our values truly are. Medicalization is a symptom of our desire to control our own destines--medical interventions are widely believed to be effective--not a problem to be fixed.

It's pretty much what it says on the tin. Lt Col Hambleton goes down behind enemy lines in the midst of the 1972 Easter Offensive, and after 12 days manages to make his way to safety. This book is readable enough, but some of the dialog is, well, maybe fighter pilots did talk like that, I don't know, it's hard to believe. Lots of square-jawed USAF heroics, a few swipes at politicians and hippies, but all in all a decent enough account of a tense operation. Unfortunately, one of the major characters turns out to be a composite, and while I understand the literary reasons for doing that, it really weakens the emotional resonance of the book.

The second best new sci-fi novel I've read this year (after The Wind-Up Girl), Light is an explosive, densely intertwined triple narrative that links the near present with the far future, a psychopathic mathematician with a girl who is a star-ship, and delivers eyeball-kicking writing on every page. This is not an easy or obvious book to read; in some places complications pile up so high that they obscure the plot and the characters, but it is a work of staggering Imagination and Fancy. Light is ultimately about the impossible, about Tasting the Void, as it were, and does a great job of bringing us closer to the imagination and mystery.

Who cares about the details? Have some fun with some genuinely strange people and places!

Gleick manages something incredibly, a deeply scholarly work that is also highly accessible. Today, information is like air, or water to a fish, so omnipresent we do not even see it. But Gleick traces the origins of this strange concept back through the technologies of the difference engine, telegraphy, writing, and speech; and the theories of mathematican Claude Shannon and a host of allied thinkers. Information has infected biology, physics, psychology, mathematics, and almost every other science, placing limits on what can be known.

The history of technology and science is well-done, but Gleick doesn't quite live up to his potential in examining the social and political consequences of information. Words and their flow have shaped the course of history. What does it mean now when every object is linked to a stream of information? Has information theory truly overtaken and unified science? (CERN and the Human Genome Project, both epicenters of 'Big Data' might argue so). Has the immense agglomeration of facts, and the news ways in which they are created, made us better, worse, or just different? In the face of these big questions, Gleick retreats to platitudes, but that doesn't detract from the scope and power of the rest of the work.

Mindstar Rising is the best cyberpunk novel you've never read. Peter F Hamilton is better known for his sprawling space operas, but in Mindstar he presents a tight thriller set in an intriguing post-global warming England coming out of a 10 year Left Totalitarian government. Greg Mandel is a private detective with little extra, a military-grade neural implant that lets him read minds, and a simple investigation into sabotage on a space station draws him into a dizzying world of corporate intrigue, hacking, and economic warfare.

This is a first novel, but Hamilton is humble enough to leave open questions about technology, human enhancement, and corporate power, rather than try to answer them once and for all. The novel is rife with the minor details that flesh out a good setting, like the medieval street markets next to shops turned into houses, or the new April in post-global warming England. Hard sci-fi fanatics might quibble at some things (laser pistols don't work like that, computer hacking isn't like that, socialists aren't like that, etc), but I don't care. The setting smells right, and unlike his other novels, Hamilton ends this one without the old deus ex machina.

America Genesis claims to cover a century of innovation, but the core of the book is much more tightly focused on the Second Industrial Revolution, electrification, motor transport, and mass production, and the rise of the immense technological systems which characterize modern life. Biographical sketches of major inventors like Edison, Telsa, the Wright brothers, along with system builders like Henry Ford, Samuel Insull, and the architects of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

However, American Genesis makes some 'interesting' choices about content, which combined with the length of the book can be rather frustrating. Land grant colleges and the influence of the German scientific style on American universities are not mentioned. DARPA, NASA, the NSF, NIH, and most of the post-war Federal scientific system are similarly glossed over. The Atomic Energy Commission and the nuclear Navy get a lot of space, but they're not particularly characteristic of American science. Soviet technical development (the USSR basically imported an entire industrial plant from America in the 1920s) is interesting, but not really relevant to the book. And while I enjoyed the section on Modernism as an artistic and architectural movement as a European reflection of the American technological style, it felt totally extraneous.

As a whole, I found America Genesis discursive and unfocused. The individual anecdotes of inventors and events are interesting, but the theoretical development surrounding the rise of 'system builders' isn't as rigorous as it could be. Hughes basically did not examine what I thought to be the most interesting historical question of the period: How scientific and technical knowledge became a core input of industry in the same way that coal or steel was, and how that reconfigured society.