A searing indictment of the lack of affordable care available for the treatment of mentally ill adolescents.
The mother of a mentally ill son who suffered from uncontrollable rages proves to be a powerful advocate for children with mental illness and their families.
When Long worked at Boise State University, she maintained a Facebook blog to which she posted anonymously. In December 2012, when she learned about 20-year-old Adam Lanza's murderous rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, she was fearful for her son's future. Until then, she had kept details of her son's violent episodes secret from friends and co-workers due to the stigma attached to mental illness. After the Sandy Hook episode, she shared her cry for help in a blog post in which she revealed her own circumstances: “In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it's easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.” Her post went viral and was subsequently published by Boise State’s online journal Blue Review with the title, “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother.” This led to a highly viewed Huffington Post repost and invitations to appear on national talk shows. In her book, Long cites statistics that estimate the extent of mental illness in children to be “one in five children in the United States,” many of whom have few opportunities for treatment. She writes of the toll this takes on parents and her own yearslong struggle to get effective treatment for her son and how, after exhausting other options, she was forced to turn to the juvenile justice system for help. The author reviews advances in diagnosing childhood mental illness and unraveling the “complex cocktail of genetic predisposition, environmental facts, and family dynamics” that contribute to mental illness in children and adolescents. Only in 2013 was Long’s son diagnosed with bipolar disorder, compounded by problems of sensory integration.
A searing indictment of the lack of affordable care available for the treatment of mentally ill adolescents.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59463-257-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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