Monday, June 23, 2008

A Brief History of Anxiety

A Brief History of Anxiety: Yours and Mine by Patricia Pearson is a meditation on her own personal experiences as well as our culture's with anxiety. It is written in this gentle style that I am very fond of. It reads easy. But it contains a lot of information and ideas.

Although in the end it was rather unsatisfying (we have so much anxiety in our culture because of a lack of meaning, an emptiness left where Reason eradicated Religion, etc) her exploration of all sorts of phenomena - anxiety in other culture's, the neurology of anxiety, medication, self-help, and the like -- as well as her copious reference to other authors and research, made it a fascinating as well as pleasurable read.

I know that was an atrocious sentence. Forgive me.

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