April 21, 2014

Two new books

Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree: Chidren and the Search for Identity (Scribner, New York 2012) is an opus magnum of 900 pages which doesn't specifically cover ADHD/ADD but delves into the meaning (challenges and rewards) of raising children who are different (deaf, dwarfism, autism, severe retardation, criminality among others).  Each chapter on a specific disability could nearly a be a book on its own in terms of the depth and breadth of the material covered.  In the end Solomon's personal story and the stories of so many other families in this book extol a humanism that is uplifting. 

 

The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money  and Today's Push for Performance by Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler (Oxford, New York, 2014) is the most recent best survey of the ADHD/medication "scene" to be published recently.  The authors truly see ADHD as a neurological isse but defined with different contexts as problems.  They bring full circle back to the academic mainstream thinking of ADHD as a biopsychosocial disorder (something I stated quite clearly sixteen years ago in Running on Ritalin).  It would have been nice to received a little bit of credit but that takes nothing away from the importance of this book as an up to date exploration of the ADHD phenomenon in America today.

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