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Widely regarded as the finest poet of his generation, Seamus Heaney is the subject of numerous critical studies, but no book-length portrait has appeared before now. Through his own lively and eloquent reminiscences, Stepping Stones retraces the poet’s steps from his first exploratory testing of the ground as an infant to what he called his “moon-walk” to the podium to receive the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It also fascinatingly charts his post-Nobel life and is supplemented with a number of photographs, many from the Heaney family album and published here for the first time. In response to firm but subtle questioning from Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney sheds a personal light on his work (poems, essays, translations, plays) and on the artistic and ethical challenges he faced during the dark years of the Ulster Troubles. Combining the spontaneity of animated conversation with the considered qualities of the best autobiographical writing, Stepping Stones provides an original, diverting, and absorbing store of reflections and recollections. Scholars and general readers alike are brought closer to the work, life, and creative development of a charismatic and lavishly gifted poet whose latest collection, District and Circle, was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2007.

• Sales Rank: #266555 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-09
• Released on: 2008-12-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.83" w x 6.39" l, 1.87 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 560 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. There is no shortage of writing by or about Nobel Prize–winning Irish poet Heaney. Yet this big book is a unique and useful addition to the Heaney canon: beginning in 2001, the Dublin-based poet, essayist and anthologist O'Driscoll entered into an extended correspondence with Heaney for the purpose of collaboratively constructing a kind of autobiography-in-interviews. The result is a collection of 16 discreet interviews, the first two of which discuss Heaney's childhood and poetic growth. Then there is one interview-chapter for each of Heaney's celebrated books (except the last two, which are grouped together), followed by a summing up. In conversation, Heaney comes across as extremely friendly, expansively intelligent and in possession of the groundedness in the details of his environment that readers of his poems will be familiar with. Here are boyhood recollections (Our travelling grocery van... was run first by a man called McCarney, but 'the egg man' was our name for him), memories of the famous Belfast Group and accounts of coming-of-age, and then coming to international prominence, against the backdrop of Ireland's troubled 20th-century politics. And, of course, Heaney traces the events—both political and personal—that led to many of his poems. For fans of Heaney, of 20th-century Irish literature or anyone eager to get deep into the mind of a major artist, this is an essential book. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Praise for Stepping Stones 

“This really is a remarkable book. There isn’t a dull, vapid or useless sentence in it; it’s about what it is to be human, as much as it is about what it is to be a poet.” —Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

“[Stepping Stones] is a Heaney word horde that will not be surpassed for some time . . . [It] will be seized on by students of the work as well as the common reader . . . [Heaney] is intensely present within these pages—still surprising, still defying ‘the merciless landscapes’ with generosity, courage and joy.” —Bel Mooney, The Times (London)

“[An] important book-length interview, designed to serve in lieu of a memoir . . . Dennis O’Driscoll [is] an excellent poet and critic, and a deeply informed and probing interviewer of his longtime friend.” —Adam Kirsch, The New Republic

“Stepping Stones succeeds on many levels, and O’Driscoll’s intelligent probing to go beyond Seamus Heaney the public figure to the inner man, to the essential inner poet, is masterful.” —Katherine Bailey, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“These ‘linked interviews,’ as O’Driscoll calls them, set out to trace, book by book, the contours of Heaney’s writing life and the events and memories that inform it. To a great degree, they succeed.” —Sean O’Hagan, The Observer (London)

About the Author
Dennis O'Driscoll’s previous publications include New and Selected Poems and Reality Check. He is the author of a collection of essays and reviews, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams, and works as a civil servant in Dublin.

Most helpful customer reviews

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Rosemary O'Leary
Wonderful, wonderful Seamus Heaney!

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
interviews of the past decade with our greatest living poet
By Love Thy Enemy
We welcome the arrival of this thick (over five hundred pages) collection of interviews with Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney conducted over the past decade by Dublin civil servant, poet and essayist Dennis O'Driscoll, who describes his interviewing role thus: "My own role here is that of prompter rather than interrogator -the book was in no sense envisaged to be a 'tell all' account of Seamus Healey's life. ( . . .Yet)The only stipulation made at the outset by the poet was that he would not engage in detailed analytical discussion of individual poems. ( . . .)This book does not pretend to be an authorized 'reader's guide' to Seamus Healey's poems as reference points. It offers a biographical context for the poems and a poetry-based account of the life. It reviews the life by re-viewing it from the perspective of Heaney's late sixties: a life which has itself been monitored - sometimes almost as closely as his books have been reviewed - by critics and
journalists (Introduction, pp. xi, xii)."

With those caveats this massive work goes on to explore freely all of the above and more.

If you wish a profound, technical, thematic examination of the earlier works of Heaney (up to 1998 and The Spirit Level) you do very well to read carefully the much briefer (not 200 small pages) work of the great critic and professor Helen Vendler in Seamus Heaney. In any case her work is the most accessible and kindest manner to approach this great Irish poet's opus; she truly and gently lies open the meaning and possibilities of his writing in a global manner limited only by the demands of the shortened space, much as she did with Heaney's forefather more fully in Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form as well as The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Here, as Irish poet O'Driscoll cautions, we may not find the poet's technical explication of the development of his writing, although this tangentially is inevitable. We find the life and the context granted by that life for this most transcendent yet deeply involved poet. That life in times of Troubles and of woe and of political and spiritual waste, of human waste, provides much which troubles the poet deeply in his search for a true expression of a deeper (transcendent) meaning, one which we may discover as well through careful reading of the work.

Stylistically this book is set up in a catechetical question and answer format reminiscent of that penultimate episode in Ulysses (Gabler Edition), another influence for Mr. Heaney. This might bring a smile to some readers' lips, or a compulsion to read; it is refreshing, and one feels the humility, the subtlety, the invisibility which O'Driscoll brings to his enormous task.

The chapters are arranged around the volumes of work; as cautioned above the discussion will be neither technical nor analytical of individual poems, but of the life which gave them fruition. In a way we may find this disingenuous as this life cannot be separate from this poetry; a close discussion of certain relevant lines and their significances is inevitable and unavoidable and very, very welcomed.

The Nobel Laureate and Irish Poet Seamus Heaney has been one of our greatest poets in English in this past half century; we do well to read him now as ever to understand where we come from and where we stand and to where we may be going: this is the service, the grace, the gift of any great and serious poet, and in particular the gifted, trained Heaney.

Let us start at the beginning to understand his life's work once more. The individual volumes are readily available here upon this broad amazon, but it might be more favorable to get the recollection of the early volumes in Poems, 1965-1975: Death of a Naturalist / Door Into the Dark / Wintering Out / North. In any case I urge you to collect all that you can of him, including the several recordings, and read or listen as carefully and deeply as possible, repeatedly, as lectio divina, and learn about our world more than any news broadcaster or commentator can holler at you. Heaney has thought most deeply about these things, and shares most clearly and succinctly Truth, generously, with us within the tradition of poetry in the English and Saxon and Irish tongues. Oddly we find not much discussion of his excellent translation (and recording) of Beowulf.

Read this book. A worthy Christmas gift!

Within the text, Heaney discusses the very phenomenon we find mentioned by O'Driscoll in the Introduction, that a meta-analysis of the poetry itself serves no one well. In discussing the "solemn" Station Island, Heaney comments: I didn't begin, as you know, by writing at the head of my page, 'Now I shall punish lyric.' After the poem was published, I was trying to characterize it from the outside - and doing so, I suppose, in order to give a new reader some orientation. There's a very earnest note to the thing, but I don't think I could have done it any other way. The literary critic in me might have fun with what eventually came out, but the poet in me just had to work through the material that was piled up in the middle of his road. Then if you'll excuse the expression, he lightened up and got a bit of lift-off in Sweeney Redividus' (p. 240)."

The best orientation a new reader might find lies within Vendler's study, although it is ten years too short. This present study adequately makes up the short fall and far more. Meet our greatest living poet, and study him very well.

Excellent, comprehensive bibliography, glossary, maps and chronology, etc., accompany these interviews, as one would expect from such a precisely academic work. Give it to one you love very deeply. Give it to yourself to grow in love and in wisdom, but read it!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A "different" but excellent biography
By Jean Cork
I happened to be writing a paper on Seamus Heaney, the contemporary Irish poet, for my literary club. There is no official "biography" as such but this is better! It's a series of questions and answers put to Mr. Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll, a very talented writer in his own right. It is anything but dry, as so many biographies are. I really feel that I "know" Mr. Heaney now. Mr. O'Driscoll is a skilled interviewer and asks questions I never would have thought of. The book is fairly long and took several years to write but is so interesting that it's a fast read. I really really liked this book!

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~ Ebook Free The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking and the Search for Lost Species, by Scott Weidensaul

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A round-the-world detective story about rediscovering vanished species

Three or four times an hour, eighty or more times a day, a unique species of plant or animal vanishes forever. It is, scientists say, the worst global extinction crisis in the last sixty-five million years -- the hemorrhage of thirty thousand irreplaceable life-forms each year. And yet, every so often one of these lost species resurfaces, such as the Indian forest owlet, considered extinct for more than a century when it was rediscovered in 1997. Like heirlooms plucked from a burning house, they are gifts to an increasingly impoverished world.

In The Ghost with Trembling Wings, naturalist Scott Weidensaul pursues these stories of loss and recovery, of endurance against the odds, and of surprising resurrections. The search takes Weidensaul to the rain forests of the Caribbean and Brazil in pursuit of long-lost birds, to the rugged mountains of Tasmania for the striped, wolflike marsupial known as the thylacine, to cloning laboratories where scientists struggle to re-create long-extinct animals, and even to the moorlands and tidy farms of England on the trail of mysterious black panthers whose existence seems to depend on the faith of those looking for them. The Ghost with Trembling Wings is a book of exploration and a survey of the frontiers of modern science and wildlife biology. It is, in the end, the story of our desire for a wilder, bigger, more complete world.

• Sales Rank: #219030 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.18" w x 6.14" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Approximately 30,000 species of animals and plants go extinct every year. Weidensaul's narrative concerns those rare occurrences when a supposedly extinct animal makes a surprise reappearance, and the much more frequent occasions when scientists or civilians only think they've sighted a vanished creature. His suspenseful naturalist detective stories take readers all over the globe to Madagascar, Indonesia, Peru, Costa Rica in search of these lost species. In the swamplands of Louisiana, the author and his guide brave swarming mosquitoes and deadly vipers to check out reports of an ivory-billed woodpecker. Weidensaul (Living on the Wind) recounts famous success stories, like the recovery of the coelacanth, a fish believed to be extinct for about 80 million years until fishermen landed one off the coast of South Africa in 1938, as well as various wild goose chases and his own obsessive search for the South American cone-billed tanager. Along the way, he shows how humans and nature have unwittingly conspired to condemn animals to oblivion, such as the dozens of Great Lakes fish species lost to overfishing and the inadvertent introduction of parasitic lampreys from canals built in the 19th century. For the most part, though, Weidensaul's gracefully written book strikes a hopeful note, reveling in the exhilaration of the searches themselves: the greatest gift these lost creatures give this too-fast, too-small, too-modern world [is] an opportunity for hope. Illus. and maps not seen b.
- an opportunity for hope. Illus. and maps not seen by
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American
Weidensaul writes superbly about animals and his role as an amateur naturalist in studying them, as he showed in Living on the Wind (1999) on migratory birds. Here his subject is the search for lost species, often as a participant. Among the species are Semper's warbler, the golden toad and the ivory-billed woodpecker. Most searches fail, but Weidensaul describes some successes: the rediscovery of lost species, including Gilbert's potoroo, the large Jamaican iguana and the Congo bay owl. Imagining [a rediscovery] leads to a germ of hope, he writes, and hope sometimes leads to belief, to obsession and piles of old maps, to fruitless expeditions and squandered life savings. All of which would seem a sad and farcical pathology, except that just often enough, some lucky searcher hits pay dirt, and the world stands surprised and delighted with the discovery.

Editors of Scientific American

From Booklist
Every so often a species thought to be extinct is rediscovered and officially brought back from the dead. Weidensaul, author of the lyrical Living on the Wind (1999), opens with his search for a lost bird in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, a search for a tiny gray warbler whose song was not even known to science. Other hunts for supposedly extinct animals follow: for the Australian night parrot, rediscovered as a flattened roadkill in 1990; for the Indian forest owlet, museum specimens of which were found to have fraudulent location data; for the possible cloning of extinct species such as the mammoth; and even for proof of cryptozoological species like the Loch Ness monster. He offers a wonderfully succinct treatise on the causes of extinction, the use of such protective laws as the Endangered Species Act, the politics of state versus federal agencies, and the role of captive breeding in endangered species conservation. Weidensaul is a graceful writer who works an amazing amount of scientific theory into his narrative. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Most helpful customer reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
An engrossing, addictive book about species survival
By Debbie Lee Wesselmann
Scott Weidensaul has written a fascinating, page-turning exploration of the complexities of species survival and extinction. From the first chapter, a narrative account of his personal search for the probably extinct Semper's Warbler on St. Lucia, to the last chapter where he may, or may not, have found the never before seen female cone-billed tanager, this book never let go of my imagination. Most of the sought-after species in this book are never found, but a few, such as the coelacanth and the almost-aurochs, are. The author looks for big cats rumored to be living in the English countryside, and tells of the accidental rediscovery of the Australian night parrot. He provides one of the few intelligent treatises on the Loch Ness Monster and other cryptobiological "species." Even though most possibly extinct animals are never found, it's the hunt for them that excites both the author and the reader. The often suspenseful narrative is peppered with history and sharp observations as well as varied opinions. The language is rich with visual and engaging details, the kind that makes you feel as though you've entered into the "land of the lost." Trust me, you won't fall asleep reading this book. This is lay science as it should be, full of mysteries and questions, both accessible and intelligent. The author's good humor and pithy insights lend a friendly tone to his science. For example, when he is fighting insects - in his ears, eyes, and under his watch band - during a frantic search for a specific flock of birds, he writes, "There is a reason lost species are lost in the first place. Sometimes the reasons are weighty and formidable, like civil unrest, impenetrable mountains, or bandit warlords who use visitors for target practice. Sometimes they are more prosaic, like bad roads and worse information. And sometimes the reason is sweat bees - too many sweat bees." This witty, conversational tone makes The Ghost With Trembling Wings as fun to read as it is instructional.
I highly recommend this book to anyone with even the slightest interest in conservation, evolution, field biology, and environmentalism; however, you don't need to know a thing about the preceding fields to enjoy The Ghost With Trembling Wings. All you need is a healthy curiosity and the time to indulge it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A gorgeous mind-opener
By E. Kutinsky
For 310 of the most engrossing pages about things that live on earth, you won't do much better than Scott Wiedensaul's The Ghost With Trembling Wings. I came at the book with virtually no science ability and only a passing knowledge of naturalism or species conservation, but it doesn't matter - Trembling Wings works so effectively because all it really requires to catch onto Wiedensaul's point of view is any sort of awe at the variety of organisms and the varied regions in which they show up. Wiedensaul's prose is transporting in the best way - he gives the mosquito-encrusted white reaches of Siberia the same impressive eloquence that he gives the rivers of Louisiana or the Mato Grasso region of Brazil. His eloquence is so surprising, he manages to find poetry in the everyday actions of species, fascinating or not. Check out this description simply of film footage of the Thylacine in Tasmania: "Though the thylacine was said to be stiff and awkward in its movements, this one seemed as graceful as the cramped, artificial surroundings would permit; the film showed a lithe, tapered animal, but to an eye used to a dog or wolf, the proportions seemed a bit off - the head looked too long and conical, the ears too small, the almost tubular tail too straight and stiff." It's written mastery like that that makes The Ghost With Trembling Wings as beautifully specific as it is evocatively universal, giving vivid breadth to the human need to penetrate the outside world in whatever form rouses our deepest passions.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Contagiously thrilling hunts
By Eileen G.
Scott Weidensaul says early in this careful and remarkable book that he has "an untrained eye," but of course he's being much too humble. Weidensaul, an accomplished naturalist who seems also totally comfortable with people, traveled the globe for this book and he writes that the search for lost species is "a good deal more subtle than I'd originally realized." He calls the process of rediscovery "the many ways in which the lost come back from the grave," and explains that what at first may seem like the business of biology and science is in fact "enmeshed with human psychology, deep-seated desires, and the ways, accurate or imagined, in which we view our world." Later in his narrative he confesses that if he had one crack at a working time machine, he would without a doubt set it for "about twenty thousand years in the past." The last Ice Age would have had a terrific reporter in Weidensaul.
There is a variety of famous and not so famous little-known and in some cases "extinct" creatures (Bachman's Warbler on the island of St. Lucia, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the Australian night parrot, the golden toad, and more) to be written about. Weidensaul delves into theories of hybridization, cloning, and numerous current issues in nature and science. As to the discovery of obscure or assumed-vanished species, he writes that finding an unknown plant or animal is not difficult since "the roughly one million species that scientists have named and catalogued may represent only a tenth to a thirtieth of the planet's total biota." For example, never-before catalogued species of birds emerge from the famously shrinking tropics at the rate of one or two per year.
His stories combine reportage and layman's science with historical narrative. The writing, sometimes about complicated matters, is delightfully clear; you would be thrilled to find it in a good magazine that publishes high-quality nonfiction pieces of some length. He explains some of the bravery, hunches, and wonderfully educated guesswork, along with incredible heroism and pluck, that the scientific and naturalist communities have shown in the search for "lost" species. The author is present, but never the center of attention. He's a naturalist and a reporter; his stories are bracing and exciting. Weidensaul's grasp of issues in nature, science, the mysteries of lost species and the people who fight to find them is firm. There are notes, a bibliography, and 15-page index.

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A field guide to the twenty-first century, written by one of its most celebrated observers

We all sense it―something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your kids. You can’t miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are being transformed in so many realms all at once―and it is dizzying.
In Thank You for Being Late, a work unlike anything he has attempted before, Thomas L. Friedman exposes the tectonic movements that are reshaping the world today and explains how to get the most out of them and cushion their worst impacts. You will never look at the world the same way again after you read this book: how you understand the news, the work you do, the education your kids need, the investments your employer has to make, and the moral and geopolitical choices our country has to navigate will all be refashioned by Friedman’s original analysis.
Friedman begins by taking us into his own way of looking at the world―how he writes a column. After a quick tutorial, he proceeds to write what could only be called a giant column about the twenty-first century. His thesis: to understand the twenty-first century, you need to understand that the planet’s three largest forces―Moore’s law (technology), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)―are accelerating all at once. These accelerations are transforming five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community.
Why is this happening? As Friedman shows, the exponential increase in computing power defined by Moore’s law has a lot to do with it. The year 2007 was a major inflection point: the release of the iPhone, together with advances in silicon chips, software, storage, sensors, and networking, created a new technology platform. Friedman calls this platform “the supernova”―for it is an extraordinary release of energy that is reshaping everything from how we hail a taxi to the fate of nations to our most intimate relationships. It is creating vast new opportunities for individuals and small groups to save the world―or to destroy it.
Thank You for Being Late is a work of contemporary history that serves as a field manual for how to write and think about this era of accelerations. It’s also an argument for “being late”―for pausing to appreciate this amazing historical epoch we’re passing through and to reflect on its possibilities and dangers. To amplify this point, Friedman revisits his Minnesota hometown in his moving concluding chapters; there, he explores how communities can create a “topsoil of trust” to anchor their increasingly diverse and digital populations.
With his trademark vitality, wit, and optimism, Friedman shows that we can overcome the multiple stresses of an age of accelerations―if we slow down, if we dare to be late and use the time to reimagine work, politics, and community. Thank You for Being Late is Friedman’s most ambitious book―and an essential guide to the present and the future.

• Sales Rank: #26997 in Books
• Published on: 2016-11-22
• Released on: 2016-11-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .0 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

Review

One of the Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2016, Publishers Weekly

"[Friedman's] latest engrossingly descriptive analysis of epic trends and their consequences . . . Friedman offers tonic suggestions for fostering 'moral innovation' and a commitment to the common good in this detailed and clarion inquiry, which, like washing dirty windows, allows us to see far more clearly what we’ve been looking at all along . . . his latest must-read." ―Booklist (starred review)

"The three-time Pulitzer winner puts his familiar methodology―extensive travel, thorough reporting, interviews with the high-placed movers and shakers, conversations with the lowly moved and shaken―to especially good use here . . . He prescribes nothing less than a redesign of our workplaces, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and communities . . . Required reading for a generation that's 'going to be asked to dance in a hurricane.'" ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About the Author
Thomas L. Friedman is a three-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his work with The New York Times and the author of six bestselling books, including The World Is Flat.

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In The Improbability Principle, the renowned statistician David J. Hand argues that extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they're commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.
But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of "miracle" is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need, Hand argues, is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.
Together, these constitute Hand's groundbreaking Improbability Principle. And together, they explain why we should not be so surprised to bump into a friend in a foreign country, or to come across the same unfamiliar word four times in one day. Hand wrestles with seemingly less explicable questions as well: what the Bible and Shakespeare have in common, why financial crashes are par for the course, and why lightning does strike the same place (and the same person) twice. Along the way, he teaches us how to use the Improbability Principle in our own lives―including how to cash in at a casino and how to recognize when a medicine is truly effective.
An irresistible adventure into the laws behind "chance" moments and a trusty guide for understanding the world and universe we live in, The Improbability Principle will transform how you think about serendipity and luck, whether it's in the world of business and finance or you're merely sitting in your backyard, tossing a ball into the air and wondering where it will land.

• Sales Rank: #456174 in Books
• Published on: 2014-02-11
• Released on: 2014-02-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.21" h x .97" w x 6.39" l, 1.07 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Booklist
Multiple lottery wins. Unexpected financial meltdowns. Lightning striking the same person several times. These events, while astounding, are nonetheless to be expected, as mathematics professor Hand capably explains in this well-plotted book. The principle hinges on the idea that seemingly improbable events, from the individual to the cosmic level, are commonplace due to several factors. Academic but not dry, the concepts are presented in a relevant way and at a good clip, with some eye-catching examples. Hand notes the counterintuitive nature of certain aspects of probability, as well as the history of how understanding in the field has developed. A touch of levity goes a long way toward making the subject engaging. As Hand shows, probabilities are also about people—what we view as remarkable and why. Far from being disillusioning or removing the magic from these events, the elegant framework beneath marvelous events is something worth marveling at in itself. For those interested in an understanding of the principles of probability, this account is sure to be an odds-on favorite, even for those without much background in the subject. --Bridget Thoreson

Review

“Human beings are a superstitious lot; we see patterns everywhere. But as Hand makes clear in this enlightening book, it all comes down to the math.” ―Jennifer Ouellette, The New York Times Book Review

“Very engaging . . . If you wish to read about how probability theory can help us understand the apparent hot hand in a basketball game, superstitions in gambling and sports, prophecies, parapsychology and the paranormal, holes in one, multiple lottery winners, and much more, this is a book you will enjoy. I will go further. The statistician Samuel S. Wilks (paraphrasing H.G. Wells) said that ‘statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.' With that laudable goal in mind, The Improbability Principle should be, in all probability, required reading for us all.” ―John A. Adam, The Washington Post

“[A] lucid overview of the mathematics of chance and the psychological phenomena that can make probability seem counter-intuitive to so many . . . Hand has written a superlative introduction to critical thinking, accessible to everybody, regardless of mathematical ability.” ―New Scientist

“[An] ingenious introduction to probability that mixes counterintuitive anecdotes with easily digestible doses of statistics . . . Hand offers much food for thought, and readers willing to handle some simple mathematics will find this a delightful addition to the 'why people believe weird things' genre.” ―Publishers Weekly

“Lively and lucid . . . an intensely useful (as well as a remarkably entertaining) book . . . It can transform the way you read the newspaper, that's for sure.” ―Salon

“[Hand] leads readers through this unfamiliar land of probability and statistics with wit and charm, all the while explaining in layman's terms the laws that govern it . . . We predict there's a very good chance you'll enjoy this book” ―Success

“Enlightening and entertaining . . . an erudite but utterly unpretentious guide . . . ably and assuredly demystifies an ordinarily intimidating subject” ―Kirkus

“In my experience, it is very rare to find a book that is both erudite and entertaining. Yet The Improbability Principle is such a book. Surely this cannot be due to chance alone!” ―Hal R. Varian, chief economist at Google and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley

“Considering that The Improbability Principle comes from the keyboard of David J. Hand, it was perhaps inevitable that it would be a certain winner!” ―John Pullinger, president of the Royal Statistical Society

“Written by one of the world's preeminent statisticians, The Improbability Principle provides you with a sense of what chance and improbability really mean, and engenders an understanding that uncertainty rests at the core of nature. I highly recommend this book.” ―Joseph M. Hilbe , president of the International Astrostatistics Association and ambassador for the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology

“As someone who happened to meet his future wife on a plane, on an airline he rarely flew, I wholeheartedly endorse David J. Hand's fascinating guide to improbability, a subject that affects the lives of us all, yet until now has lacked a coherent exposition of its underlying principles.” ―Gordon Woo, catastrophist at Risk Management Solutions and author of Calculating Catastrophe

“The Improbability Principle is an elegant, astoundingly clear, and enjoyable combination of subtle statistical thinking and real-world events. David J. Hand really does explain why ‘surprising' things will happen and why statistics matters.” ―Andrew Dilnot, coauthor of The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life

About the Author
David J. Hand is an emeritus professor of mathematics and a senior research investigator at Imperial College London. He is the former president of the Royal Statistical Society and the chief scientific adviser to Winton Capital Management, one of Europe's most successful algorithmic-trading hedge funds. He is the author of seven books, including The Information Generation: How Data Rules Our World and Statistics: A Very Short Introduction, and has published more than three hundred scientific papers. Hand lives in London, England.

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78 of 83 people found the following review helpful.
"It Can't Happen" Happens All the Time
By Rob Hardy
Years ago my wife was looking through the books at a Goodwill store, and for a gag gift for my birthday she bought me a volume of poems by Rod McKuen, whose work I do not like. Helen brought it home and was going to wrap it when she looked inside. There was a dedication in the book signed by the author himself: “To Rob - May you always sleep warm. --Rod McKuen.” Now I have a volume of McKuen’s poetry I cannot throw away, but more to the point, how is it possible that completely by chance that she should pick up such a book bearing a dedication to someone of the same name? It just does not seem that such a thing could happen. It’s the sort of story told many times in _The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day_ (Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by mathematician David Hand. Hand knows that it is tough to write about mathematics for the layman, perhaps even more so for probability which he says “is renowned for its counterintuitive nature, more than any other area of mathematics. Even the most eminent mathematicians have been tripped up by it.” Yet there are few equations here, there are many astounding stories, and many of Hand’s explanations are drawn from tossing a humble die.

The book starts with its main contradiction, only a seeming contradiction and one of many explained away within these pages: How is it possible that extremely unlikely things happen, and not only happen, but happen over and over? Hand gives satisfying answers, but besides being a book about extraordinarily improbable events, this is also a book that explains probability in general. Take the law of inevitability: Something has to happen. In a lottery, each possible ticket has so tiny a chance of winning that you might think it a miracle if yours is the one chosen. But what _is_ certain is that some ticket will be picked to win (or if not, the stakes will be raised for the next draw when there will be a winner). It is thus dead certain that an improbable event will occur. There’s the law of truly large numbers: if there are enough possible opportunities, any outrageously unlikely event can happen. If you toss a coin enough times, and have a near-eternity to do so, you will get a run of a hundred heads; it simply has to happen. These are understood strictly with probability theory, but we have also to supplement our “understanding” of rare events by human foibles. The law of selection, for instance, says that you can make probabilities as high as you like, in retrospect. It’s like shooting arrows into the side of a barn and then painting bullseyes around each one. All of us are liable, too, to confirmation bias; we notice events that reinforce what we wish to believe and we disregard data that does not fit. Prophets and astrologers harness this tendency all the time. And sometimes we use bad equipment for our research. Federal law has specific and strict rules for every die thrown in a casino, but dice you get in a Monopoly set are far from such strict engineering and they have bias; research into psychokinesis, the ability to control die tosses, has been criticized because it used ordinary dice.

Readers of Hand’s book will have a happy tour of many aspects of probability, delivered by a guide who is knowledgeable and funny. Even if some of the math gets by you, the astonishing stories are sure to impress you, like the ones about people who have won the lottery more than once. Spare a little sympathy, however, for Maureen Wilcox, who in 1980 bought lottery tickets in both the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She picked all the right numbers, too. Except the numbers she picked for Rhode Island won in Massachusetts, and vice versa.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
Dull as it gets
By Skeptical by nature
I've read a lot of books on statistics, both texts for work and more casual books for entertainment value. This is among the worst that I have read.

The examples are dull, recycled, and mostly uninteresting. The concepts seem too basic for the length of the book. And in the end it just is not interesting. Pass on this one.

When I read one star reviews, I often wish the reviewers would tell me what they did enjoy, so that I could calibrate their review and, potentially, so that I could find something better. So here I'll do that. Here are two books of similar nature, both of which are far better than The Improbability Principle:
1, The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow
2, Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Amazon Customer
Read this book and giving it as a gift to my buddy.

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~ Free PDF The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin, by Gyorgy Dalos

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In 1945 Isaiah Berlin, working in Russia for the British Foreign Office, met Anna Akhmatova almost by chance in what was then Leningrad. The brief time they spent together one long November evening was a transformng experience for both, and has become a cardinal moment in modern literary history.

For Akhmatova, Berlin was a "guest from the future," her ideal reader outside the nightmare of Soviet life and a link with a lost Russian world; he became a figure in her cryptic masterpiece "Poem without a Hero." For Berlin, this "most memorable" meeting with the beautiful poet of genius was a spur to his ideas on liberty and on history. But there were tragic consequences: the Soviet authorities thought Berlin was a British spy, Akhmatova became a suspected enemy, and until her death in 1966 the KGB persecuted her family. Though Akhmatova was convinced that she and Berlin had inadvertently started the Cold War, she remembered him gratefully and he inspired some of her finest poems.
György Dalos--who inteviewed Berlin and many others who knew Akhmatova well, and who examined hitherto-secret KGB and Poliburo files--tells the inside story of how Stalin and other Soviet leaders dealt with Akhmatova. He ends with the touching story of her posthumous rehabilitation, when Russians astronomers discovered a new star and name it after her.

• Sales Rank: #2995786 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.50" h x 5.50" w x 1.25" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In the annals of 20th-century literature, few encounters between great writers were at once so ephemeral and so fraught with meaning as the evening in 1945 that Isaiah Berlin spent in the Leningrad home of Anna Akhmatova. The celebrated Russian poet saw Berlin, a Russian-born Oxford professor of political theory, then first secretary for the British Embassy in Moscow, as a visionary from the democratic world that she'd never experienced. According to Dalos, Akhmatova became romantically obsessed with Berlin and placed him as the central figure in a famously cryptic masterpiece, "Poem Without a Hero." The encounter also left Akhmatova under the surveillance of the KGB, who denounced Berlin as a British spy. Dalos, a Russian novelist and literary critic who now lives in Berlin, was captivated by the story at a 1993 meeting of the Heinrich B?ll Foundation in Moscow, at which a former KGB official delivered a paper on Akhmatova and her secret government file. Quoting at length from Akhmatova's friends and supporters, and from extensive interviews with Berlin, who died in 1997, Dalos makes considerable headway in recasting Akhmatova's lifework. Dalos is least convincing when using complex passages from her writing to support his theories about her relationship with Berlin. When weaving together details from Russian history and the notes and letters of Berlin and Akhmatova, his writing is more graceful, lending support to the growing reputation of a poet who only late in life earned global publication and an honorary doctorate from Oxford, and for whom a star was named in 1988, 22 years after her death.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Hungarian writer Dalos brings his powerful dissident's voice (1985, 1984) to the story of the ill-fated meeting between poet and philosopher. On the eve of the Cold War, a night in November 1945, Isaiah Berlin, then first secretary to the British Embassy in Moscow, met the greatest living Russian poet, the mercurial Anna Akhmatova. The two spent some 12 hours talking, and ever after Akhmatova thought of the Englishman as a lover of sorts and, Dalos believes, as the poetical figure the guest from the future, who appears in one of her greatest works, Poem Without a Hero. The long-term consequences of the meeting, however, may have been baleful; the already controversial Akhmatova found herself the recipient of a scathing denunciation by Stalin's arts czar, in which she was infamously characterized as ``a nun . . . and a whore.'' She was unable to publish her verse, barely able to eke out a living as a translator, and her son was sent to the gulag. Berlin would be haunted by guilt feelings for the rest of his life, although Dalos doubts that the visit was the trigger for the repression that followed. For the rest of her life (she died of a heart attack in 1966), Akhmatova would be in and out of favor depending on the blowing winds of change in the Soviet government. Dalos traces the cycles of her career in a deft, ironic, often caustic voice. He has a solid grasp of the vagaries of Communist bloc governmental shenanigans and also illuminates Akhmatova's verse with some incisive analyses. Occasionally, he is reduced to guessing the motivations of the men in the Kremlin, but he is generally cautious in his surmises. A downbeat but highly insightful book, painful to read but splendidly written and researched. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"This sharply written and elegantly translated little book establishes beyond doubt that there was nothing paranoid about Akhmatova's belief that this meeting led to a succession of new misfortunes. In 1996, a street in Odessa and a new planet were posthumously named for her. Russia needs to honor its poets --once they are safely dead." --Elaine Feinstein, The Independent

"Two writers, each born in tsarist Russia, speaking across the divide, aware that their two worlds had been brought together by the slightest stroke of chance and that the morning would spin them apart again. Dalos's intriguing little book proves that this fleeting, fifteen-hour encounter has more to say of the Soviet period than any summit meeting, or any of those tedious party congresses that tried for 70 years to control the lives of an entire empire."--Philip Mardsen, The Sunday Times

"A fascinating book."--Hilary Spurling, The Daily Telegraph

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Fear and the Muse
By Peter McGivney
In 1946 the Russian born British philosoper Isaiah Berlin, then a diplomat at the British Embassy in Moscow, learned that Anna Akhmatova, one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, was still alive. He went to see her in Leningrad, spending a night talking about art, poetry, philosophy, and history. The night ended when the newspaper correspondent Randolph Churchill, the son of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, came to Akhmatova's apartment house looking for Berlin and, not knowing where to find him, began bellowing Berlin's name at the top of his lungs in the building's courtyard. This may not seem like a terribly important incident; in the course of a normal life such things are usually forgotten within a few days, but in Stalin's Soviet Union there were no normal lives. The consequences of that night are the subject of this book, a harsh unblinking look into the workings of a paranoid society and one artist's reaction to it. For Akhmatova that night was one of the greatest of her life; unlike many other pre-Revolution writers and artists she had refused to leave Russia. For her, contact with someone from outside the four prison walls of Soviet society was akin to the joy of a drowning man feels when he finally reaches the surface and fresh air; Berlin became "the guest from the future," the unnamed character in her great work 'Poem without a hero,' the reader she would have had if she lived in a normal society. But she did not. Dalos shows how all the forces of Stalinist repression turned against her; how she was publicly humiliated by the Central Committee, how her son was arrested and sent to the gulag, how Mikhail Zoshchenko, the satirist and popular writer who was condemned with her, was slowly driven mad by the government's denunciation of him and his work. If anyone is interested on the effect of totalitarianism on the lives of people this is the book to read. A great tribute to a great poet.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
For a Class, but Good View
By P. Li
Although at times the book can become a bit boring as Dalos followed Akhmatova's life, mainly because Akhmatova seems to have accepted her fate in a somewhat over-bearing, dramatic fashion, the author manages to showcase the censure of the Communist U.S.S.R.; particularly the paranoia born under Stalin. Without annoying flourish, although slightly stilted language at times due to the translation more than the author's flow, Dalos relates an important time in the life of many people in a fascinatingly factual way. In any event, the book is definitely not a staid history novel.

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~~ Get Free Ebook The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought, by David Adam

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An intimate look at the power of intrusive thoughts, how our brains can turn against us, and living with obsessive compulsive disorder

Have you ever had a strange urge to jump from a tall building or steer your car into oncoming traffic? You are not alone. In this captivating fusion of science, history, and personal memoir, David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind, and how they drive millions of us toward obsession and compulsion.
Adam, an editor at Nature and an accomplished science writer, has suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn't Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. What might lead an Ethiopian schoolgirl to eat a wall of her house, piece by piece, or a pair of brothers to die beneath an avalanche of household junk that they had compulsively hoarded? At what point does a harmless idea, a snowflake in a clear summer sky, become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts? Drawing on the latest research on the brain, as well as historical accounts of patients and their treatments, this is a book that will challenge the way you think about what is normal and what is mental illness.
Told with fierce clarity, humor, and urgent lyricism, this extraordinary book is both the haunting story of a personal nightmare and a fascinating doorway into the darkest corners of our minds.

• Sales Rank: #149992 in Books
• Brand: Adam, David
• Published on: 2015-01-20
• Released on: 2015-01-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.61" h x 1.11" w x 5.76" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Review

“Adam is a companionable Virgil, guiding the reader through the hellish circles of the disorder, explaining scientific concepts in clear, nontechnical prose . . . For sufferers, the thirst for relief from intrusive thoughts and compulsions can be unending and, ultimately, unquenchable. David Adam's book should provide them with consolation (you are not alone) and hope (he's much better now)--and it provides all readers with a fascinating glimpse of an unusual but enduring form of psychopathology.” ―Scott Stossel, The New York Times Book Review

“Adam provides a compelling, often frightening, description of the havoc OCD can wreak. He also provides hope that while OCD can derail even the most placid life, it can be overcome.” ―USA Today

“[A] remarkable account of obsessive-compulsive disorder” ―Seattle Times

“[A] searing account . . . The mental-disorder memoir . . . has become its own genre, and works such as Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon and most recently Scott Stossel's My Age of Anxiety set a high standard. In The Man Who Couldn't Stop, Adam more than meets it, writing with honesty, compassion and even humor about a malady so often stigmatized and caricatured.” ―The Washington Post

“A compelling portrait . . . This is the most comprehensive and compassionate book on OCD to date, and it offers hope that our thinking and behavior--both individual and collective--can change.” ―Los Angeles Times

“Part memoir, part exploration of the science behind OCD, The Man Who Couldn't Stop is an obsessive read and one with heart.” ―People

“With the wry wit of a natural storyteller and the mastery of a science writer at the top of his game, David Adam takes readers deep into the inner workings of the obsessive brain, hijacked by uncontrollable, unwanted thoughts. The Man Who Couldn't Stop is at once a fascinating exploration of the latest neuroscience, a rollicking history of the often truly misguided attempts to heal broken minds, and a courageous chronicle of Adam's own journey from shame and stigma to understanding and healing. A wholly unexpected, illuminating, and unforgettable book.” ―Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time

“The greatest strength of his book--part memoir, part scientific treatise on obsessive-compulsive disorder--is that it meets [people who call themselves "a little OCD"] on their level: "Imagine you can never turn it off." Adam's personal insights, and case studies from the famous (Winston Churchill, Nikola Tesla) to the obscure (an Ethiopian schoolgirl who ate a wall of mud bricks), make that feat of imagination both possible and painful.” ―Mother Jones

“An engrossing first-person study of obsessive-compulsive disorder from within and without . . . Well-researched, witty, honest and irreverent, Adam's account proves as irresistible as his subject.” ―Kirkus (starred review)

“Riveting, at times disturbing, but always enlightening . . . For all the impressive marshaling of information, it is Adam's own story of his struggles with the condition . . . that is the most captivating aspect of this impressive work. Adam clearly shows both the devastating impact our thoughts can have when they turn against us, and how science is helping us fight back” ―Booklist (starred review)

“In a wide-reaching discussion that spans the spectrum of obsession, Nature editor David Adam strikes an impressive balance between humor and poignancy, and between entertaining and informing. Adam seamlessly moves between personal stories of his own struggles with OCD and case studies of other people with the disorder . . . while his smooth prose ensures an enjoyable read.” ―Publishers Weekly

“[A] fascinating study of the living nightmare that is obsessive compulsive disorder . . . [David Adam] has written one of the best and most readable studies of a mental illness to have emerged in recent years . . . [The Man Who Couldn't Stop is] a wide-ranging exploration of the illness, looking at possible causes and cures. It takes in traditional psychiatry . . ., evolutionary psychology, genetics, aversion therapy, philosophy, social history, religion, neuroscience, anthropology and even zoology . . . An honest and open and, yes, maybe life-changing work.” ―Matt Haig, The Observer (London)

“Adam, an award-winning science writer and editor at the journal Nature, is uniquely placed to examine the genetic, evolutionary, psychological, medical and ‘just plain unfortunate' possible causes of OCD. He does so with vigour, sharp analysis, compassion and occasional humor . . . A clear-sighted and eminently accessible account . . . The Man Who Couldn't Stop is a fundamentally important book.” ―Helen Davis, The Sunday Times (London)

“[An] engaging, exhaustively researched neuro memoir, a blend of brain science and personal history.” ―Melanie McGrath, Evening Standard

“A captivating first-person account of how a blizzard of unwanted thoughts can become a personal nightmare. At times shocking, at times tragic, at times unbelievably funny, it is a wonderful read.” ―James Lloyd, BBC Focus

“This blew me away. Stunning.” ―Ian Sample, The Guardian

About the Author

David Adam is a writer and editor at Nature, the world's leading scientific journal. Before that he was a specialist correspondent for The Guardian for seven years, writing on science, medicine, and the environment. In 2006 his piece on carbon offsets was chosen by the Association of British Science Writers as the year's best newspaper feature on a science subject. He has reported from Antarctica, the Arctic, China, and the depths of the Amazon jungle.

Most helpful customer reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Did I leave the oven on?
By Book Club Mom
Everyone has intrusive thoughts. Some are outrageous and some are just ordinary, uncomfortable ideas. They cruise through our minds and we process them. Most of us do that successfully. Like that funny feeling we get when we’re on the top of a mountain or a balcony, and can almost feel the jump over the edge. It doesn’t happen, but it enters our minds as a possible scenario. We think it for a split second, feel uncomfortable, maybe take a step back and move on. Or more commonly, maybe we just aren’t sure if the oven is turned off so we go back to check. It was off. Done. Here we’ve coped with two different intrusive thoughts. But people who suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) cope in a different way. They develop rituals to help them with the anxiety. A person who worries about catching an infectious disease may wash his hands not once, but over and over again, to be sure. He may spend hours doing this, inventing different dangerous scenarios in his head and repeating the process. That’s the vicious circle of OCD. The thought returns, the action repeats itself. There’s no way out.

David Adam has written a fascinating book about his own experience with OCD, when he first recognized his problem, the years he spent coping and how he got help, what treatments worked for him and what didn’t. But his book is much more than that. The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is a comprehensive study of OCD, human thought patterns, research, and treatments. Adam looks at the similarities between OCD and other related disorders and diseases like autism, hoarding, Tourette syndrome, Parkinson’s, Postpartum Depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). He looks at genetics and the theory of nature versus nurture. He explains the relationship between animal and human behavior, and between the rituals of different cultures and how they are similar to some OCD coping rituals. He discusses the history of treating OCD, including experimental brain shocks and the controversial lobotomy. Adam does all this to give the reader a full view of a condition that is still not completely understood. There are many different triggers, anxieties, and treatments and it’s a frustrating path to navigate.

One of the most interesting points Adam raises is how the entertainment industry portrays people with OCD. It’s become a popular character trait and it often treated with humor. So there may be greater awareness and it may seem more normal or interesting, but the truth is people suffer from this condition and it is difficult to treat.

Adam has a great writing style. He writes clearly and casually, despite the serious subject and he has a fun sense of humor. He did a huge amount of research to write this book, but it doesn’t read like a dry scholarly research paper. He’s very open about his own condition and he presents OCD in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you’re nosing in on people’s odd behaviors. He makes you understand them a little better.

I wanted to read some non-fiction this year and think I picked a good book. The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is informative, easy to read and looks at an important mental health problem.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Very good look at OCD from many perspectives
By sully
David Adam's book on OCD deserves to be considered one of the best overviews on the subject. He weaves in his personal agonies of having OCD in with psychological, neurological and historical aspects of this disorder. The book is paced well and doesn't bog down except with one exception when he goes on for too long critiquing the official book of psychiatric disorders. It is not that the points he makes are not valid or that they do not apply to OCD, it just could have been shortened. When he stays focused on the nuances of OCD, he is very effective.
The book praises the effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in treating OCD. CBT has been a proven breakthrough in treating anxiety related disorders and overcomes Freudian talk therapy which leads nowhere. My personal reaction to his discussion of CBT as it applies to OCD is that he overemphasizes the behavioral part of the therapy at the expense of the cognitive. The behavioral part was most effective for his problems and that is the reason he did so I am sure. It is my view that the cognitive training and insights are equally if not more effective than behavioral aspects.
The issues I have with this book do not preclude me from recommending it to anyone who either has OCD, knows someone who does or wants to learn about it. David Adam wisely points out that there are a lot of silly things said about OCD in movies and in popular culture in general which trivialize it. This book points out that OCD is a mental health condition which ruins people's lives. It is not silly, funny or amusing, it is horrendous.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant!
By Robert Meyers
David Adam's own very personal struggle--as well as the many vignettes from famous and infamous obsessive-compulsives--create a fascinating story line that connects and illustrates the psychological, biological, and historical information he shares.

Treatment, including Sertraline, has made the past 8 years easier for me than the preceding 56 (but not normal, whatever that is). "The Man Who Couldn't Stop" has made me feel less isolated.

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