The Dance of Defiance:

A Mother and Son Journey with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (Paperback)
By Nancy A Hagener

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A User's Guide to the Brain

Before consulting with customer service, it's always a good idea to read the manual. Psychiatrist John Ratey has condensed years of research on one of the most intimidating yet ubiquitous pieces of hardware in the world into the ever-handy User's Guide to the Brain. More intellectually stimulating than day-to-day practical, the Guide uses tales from Ratey's practice and other clinical venues, tidbits from neuroscientific research, and plain common sense to suggest how the brain develops and manifests personality and behavior. With section titles like "Free Will and the Anterior Cingulate Gyrus," many readers will feel intimidated, but Ratey is careful to direct his explanations to all--even those without a PhD in neuroanatomy. His interesting four-theater theory of mental function is the most directly practical section of the book, incorporating the author's years of experience with patients into a sensible framework that readers can use to better tune their own systems. Describing the changing of the guard from psychoanalysis to a more biological paradigm, Ratey writes:
Neuroscientists have, in a sense, simply taken over the elite, almost clerical office once held by analysts. The language used to describe the brain is, if anything, more opaque than any of the old psychoanalytic terminology, which was itself so obscure that only trained professionals could wade through the literature. Most people never even bother to learn such terminology, deeming that, like the language of the computer scientists of the early 1970s, it is better left to the nerds.
Determined to help us overcome our sense of helplessness in matters cranial, Ratey has shown that we can understand ourselves better and can learn quite a bit from the nerds. --Rob Lightner

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Quirky Kids

Pediatricians Dr. Perri Klass and Dr. Eileen Costello chose the term "Quirky Kids" for the title of their new book because "other people in the field were using it, and it's an affectionate term," Klass says.

"Some people were offended by it; some people thought it wasn't serious enough. We wanted to focus on the positive," adds Costello.

Some of the best parts of Quirky Kids have to do with everyday life with these "interesting, often charming" kids, as Costello calls them. But the authors, who have quirky kids of their own, take some flat-footed stands on controversial topics in the book.