The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

#214
Title: The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness
Author: Elyn R. Saks
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2008
351 pages

In the tradition of Kay Redfield Jamison, Elyn Saks, a person with a major psychiatric disorder, presents her own history from childhood to her present status as a successful professional specializing in that disorder. In Saks's case, that disorder is schizophrenia, a diagnosis with a much poorer prognosis for a successful adulthood than many other others.

Saks's account is both readable and meticulous, with only a few editing problems. She is careful neither to overdramatize nor underplay her psychotic episodes or her progress and great accomplishments. Anyone who has been forcibly put into mechanical restraints in the last couple of decades and been evaluated frequently for a lower level intervention (or has successfully pursued a grievance if they were not) has Saks to thank for her legal advocacy.

I would have liked to know more about the quality and character of her relationships with family and friends, but recognize that memoirists may choose to protect aspect of their own and others' privacy. I also would have liked to have a better sense of her psychosis. This is an area where Saks tells more than she shows.

Saks suggests, and I agree, that there may be many causes of schizophrenic spectrum disorders; this in turn implies that different people will have different constellations of disordered thinking, some more pernicious, some more dangerous, and some more treatable. When she is psychotic, Saks experiences what seems to be poor judgment, low insight, disorganization, and a relatively consistent set of paranoid delusions. At the same time, she seems to have good or very good responses to several medications, to recompensate quickly, to return to her high level of baseline functioning, to maintain meaningful and complex relationships, and to have a good emotional range. Since she also describes a variety of other physical problems, it would not surprise me if her schizophrenia were related to a greater underlying physical problem.

As a side note, I enjoyed reading about Saks's long friendship with her law school friend Steven Behnke. Behnke is now the head of the American Psychological Association's Ethics Office and I've attended a number of his workshops. I'd be interested to know how he would tell the story of his friendship with Saks, as Ann Patchett did with Lucy Grealy in Truth and Beauty.

I am not sure why Saks's diagnosis is schizophrenia rather than schizoaffective disorder. The big difference between these schizophrenic spectrum diagnoses is the presence of a mood disorder simultaneous with an episode of the thought disorder, and Saks is often diagnosed as depressed while she apparently is also psychotic. Since she works in psychiatry, I assume that she is accurate and that the evidence for this differential diagnosis is not reported in her memoir.

A War of Gifts: An Ender Story

#213
Title: A War of Gifts: An Ender Story
Author: Orson Scott Card
Publisher:
Year: 2007
125 pages

Since this is in gift book format, "125 pages" over-represents its length. Think of it as a long story or short novella. It is a cute enough holiday story, though it requires the reader to be familiar with the people and context of the Enderverse. The theme of rigidity versus flexibility in world views and rules is fairly overt but not intrusive. Probably fun for Ender fans in the way that I anticipate Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard will be for Potter fans.

Marsbound

#212
Title: Marsbound
Author: Joe Haldeman
Publisher: Ace
Year: 2008
296 pages

Marsbound invokes Heinlein at many turns, not least in its nod to Podkayne of Mars (including the female teen narrator with a younger brother and their adventures on Mars). The style is similar to Heinlein's juvenile novels, but with frank sexual intrusions that would be more characteristic of his middle period. This provides an interesting comparison to Haldeman's much-lauded The Forever War with its critique of Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

After a relatively slow opening, the story darkens, though sometimes not enough to generate suspense. Anachronistic details are jarring but do add to the impression of reading out of date juvenile science fiction: Wet diapers in the space suits, for example, or "virtual reality" college classes that must be synchronized with real time classrooms. (My students aren't hurtling away from me on a spaceship, but I still find it more convenient to teach online classes asynchronously.)

Haldeman gives the reader a nice description of aliens who don't understand aspects of their own lives. This evokes the feeling of Clarke's Childhood's End. (Unfortunately, there's a little of 3rd Rock from the Sun's Big Giant Head as well.)

Marsbound could stand alone, albeit in an unsatisfactory way, but is clearly to be followed by one or more sequels.

The Quillan Games (Pendragon, Book 7)

#211
Title: The Quillan Games (Pendragon, Book 7)
Author: D. J. MacHale
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2006
492 pages (excluding preview of next book)

The Quillan Games is considerably faster than the previous volume in the series, but still sloppy. There's sloppy proofreading for homophones, sloppy plotting, and dull writing. Again MacHale has been given too many pages and not enough editing. I'm very sorry to report that the next book in the series, The Pilgrims of Rayne, has 576 pages. I didn't enjoy or believe in the premises of this installment, or the protagonists' seeming inability to retain important information about how Saint Dane operates. Still, the action moves forward reasonably well and MacHale has done a good job of integrating material from previous books that appeared unremarkable at the time but now forms the basis for some plot points. I applaud this, and the reveals about the nature of the Travelers, and hope that the three remaining books continue this trend.

Nyum Bai! A Cambodia Cookbook

#210
Title: Nyum Bai! A Cambodia Cookbook
Editor: Yvette Elliott
Publisher: Lane Cove, N.S.W. (available here)
Year: 2007
96 pages

This cookbook, sales of which support the Green Gecko Project for children in Siem Reap, Cambodia, is probably fine for experienced cooks. However, it demonstrates a problem with publications that aren't edited by a professional. Most importantly for a cookbook, there are some recipes that don't list all of their ingredients or include instructions that are difficult to understand. On a textual level, the provenance of the recipes is unclear; are they recipes from the restaurants that sponsored them, or from editor? The photos are colorful but the focus is often on an odd point (for example, the edge of a cilantro leaf in the foreground), leaving the rest of the image slightly to very blurry. In addition, the dishes as photographed are not all prepared according to the description given in the recipe (for example, the Kari Sach Moan (Red Curry Chicken) is pictured skewered on lemongrass stalks but the ingredient list calls for finely chopped lemongrass and the instructions do not include skewering). At the level of copy editing, the book appears to suffer from multiple authors whose work has not been standardized, a persistent its/it's problem, and some disorganization. Finally, the recipes themselves have a lot of sugar even by Cambodian standards.

There is an incredible dearth of Cambodian cookbooks in English, so despite these problems, I'd still recommend picking up a copy while they're available. The sale also supports services for children, a good thing. If you plan to buy only one Cambodian cookbook, try Ghillie Bassan's The Food & Cooking of Cambodia or The Food and Cooking of Vietnam and Cambodia instead.

Edited to add: One of my colleagues recommends the cookbook From Spiders to Water Lilies, available from Monument Books.

The Rivers of Zadaa (Pendragon, Book 6)

#209
Title: The Rivers of Zadaa (Pendragon, Book 6)
Author: D. J. MacHale
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2005
411 pages

This installment of the Pendragon series was somewhat slow and sloppy. I fear that because MacHale's writing improved, he is now being cut more slack by his editor. This volume was too long for the story being told, included more dubious science than has been the case in recent volumes, and suffered from the clunkier writing that characterized MacHale's earlier work. The plot works all right as long as the reader doesn't step back to ask questions or examine it from a different angle. If you're in mid-series, you'll probably like this well enough and will focus on the characters' growing self-awareness and identity concerns. These are the best aspects of the book, and bring some welcome character focus to the series. However, I doubt that picking up this book without having read the first five would inspire a reader want to start at the beginning, as it is not sufficiently compelling in either its craft or its story.

Superior Saturday (The Keys to the Kingdom, Book 6)

#208
Title: Superior Saturday (The Keys to the Kingdom, Book 6)
Author: Garth Nix
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2008
278 pages

In contrast to previous episodes, the sixth installment of the Keys to the Kingdom series ends on a literal cliffhanger and does not in any way stand alone. Though this may disappoint some readers who want each volume to provide some closure, it neatly parallels the changes in the House, which is being destroyed and collapsing into Nothing, sometimes at Arthur's heels. As Superior Saturday strives to disrupt the levels of the house to penetrate the Incomparable Garden of Lord Sunday, the tidy structure of one book for each day is also disrupted. Though the action is briskly paced and interesting, the real story is Arthur's maturation. As he wields the power of the keys on behalf of others and to save himself, he becomes less human and more Denizen. Though Denizens are powerful and attractive, Arthur also  finds himself becoming more aggressive and contemptuous. This process of becoming the other is, of course, a metaphor for becoming an adult, and this aspect of the story is similar to the developmental metaphor of Donohue's The Stolen Child.

I hope that in the final book, Arthur will have to reconcile his human/Denizen identities, rather than renouncing one or the other, which I always think is a too-easy and meaningless solution.

Incidentally, why is there a microscope on cover? Am I forgetting something?