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Once again Tonto Fielding found himself in the service of billionaire, Ewbank Manchip. Tonto had earned a reputation as an amateur sleuth, ever since he famously solved the “who stole the kishke,” case. Manchip was certain that his business and tennis doubles partner, Eduardo Boner, was out to exploit, harm, and deceive him, even though no evidence existed to support this expectation. After an initial inquiry, I assured Manchip that he was being hyper-vigilant for potential threats, and had to explain to him that his suspicious nature would elicit a hostile response from others at the club. People were starting to perceive him as hostile, stubborn, and sarcastic. That was why no one else would partner with him on the courts. He responded by indicating that this only served to confirm his original theory. I had to explain that another billionaire would have no need for stealing one of his slippers. “That ball at the net was Boner’s to take. Yet he let it drop only to spite me,” he said.

Tonto then believed that a rational discussion about paranoia was hopeless. He had to solve the crime. It wasn’t really that hard for a master sleuth. I only had to follow the trail, which led to an fiendishly adept thief named Spot.

A rush of emotions, action around every corner, suspision and paranoia to the max. This book had my gut wrenching and my head reeling.

This was another book I had no synopsis of before reading. I didn't even have a cover to go off of. All I had was a recommendation from a friend and his request that we read it "together". Meaning he had a copy on his phone, I had a copy on my Kindle and we would try to keep the same pace.

Last night he had the goal of finishing it by Tuesday. I said, ummm, no, we need to finish this tonight. And we did! (He actually finished it before I did.)

Cory Doctorow put a new twist on the old tale of 1984. I felt the same horror as I did when reading 1984 but could relate to it a little more because it was full of known technology and based in San Francisco, a place I've always wanted to visit. But it was more than that. The characters were brilliantly developed. You could picture each one of them and realize they'd probably be your friends if you knew them in real life. You too would be an "Xnetter", jamming with the best of them, if the government unjustly took over your city.

For a technologically savvy book, you don't have to be all that tech savvy yourself to understand it. I do know the power of code and the rush you get when a computer does what you tell it to do, but that's about as far as my technology knowledge goes. (I can't program a whole computer, just simple re-coding for websites. So, don't be impressed, please.)

Living with fear of a branch of the government that has gone rogue, hiding behind a movement with a code name M1k3y, unable to tell your parents you were jailed and tortured for 5 days, Marcus Yallow represents so many ideals and fears it's a wonder he doesn't implode.

Any high school and college age kid would get a lot out of this book. The controversy it brings up and the situations it thrusts the readers into creates a world we can all relate to in some form or other. We can all either be Marcuses or Charleses. Or maybe even Darryls or Vans. Or Anges. There's a character for everyone to put themselves into. What better way to read a story than to become part of it?

Sarah, Intern

Daniel and Jason Freeman have written a groundbreaking new book defining paranoia’s impact upon not only the mentally ill but the population at large. Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear describe how exaggerated anxieties regarding terrorism, crime, and illness distress one out of four individuals today. In this excerpt from Paranoia, the Freemans look at several social issues that have instilled paranoia in society throughout the century.

In the late 1980s the psychologists Jerry Mitchell and Arlyn Vierkant discovered a battered cardboard box in a store room of Rusk State hospital in east Texas. The cardboard box turned out to contain details of more than 500 people who had been admitted to the hospital in the 1930s. Around 150 of those 500 were suffering from severe mental illness.

Mitchell and Vierkant decided to compare the stories of those 150 patients from the 1930s with the stories of 150 patients with similar problems from the 1980s. In so doing, they were exploiting a rare and fascinating opportunity to compare paranoid thoughts across half a century.

What they found was that, to some degree at least, people’s paranoid fears reflected the times they lived in. So patients from the 1980s believed they were under threat from the Secret Service, the Mafia, the Soviets, or—a little bafflingly—from lesbians. Telephones and houses were bugged. Radar and computers were being used to control people from afar.

Clearly radar and computers weren’t going to feature in the accounts from the 1930s, but neither did the Secret Service, for example. These kinds of powerful organizations or groups were noticeably absent from the fears of 1930s’ patients, though God and other religious figures were often an element (east Texas has always been a heartland of fundamentalist Christianity). One possible explanation for this change is the advent of television, which brought a whole new world—and a whole new world of threats—to a generally poor, rural, and isolated population. Before television, the threats people perceived were likely to come from more personal, parochial sources.

This focus on the ‘fear figures’ of the day is reflected in an account written in 1911 by the celebrated Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. (Bleuler was the man who coined the term ‘schizophrenia’ and who treated the legendary ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky when he fell ill with the condition.) Bleuler wrote: ‘The Freemasons, the Jesuits, the “black Jews”, their fellow-employees, mind-readers, “spiritualists”, enemies invented ad hoc, are constantly straining every effort to annihilate or at least torture and frighten the patients.’ In the early twentieth century it’s Freemasons, Jesuits, and ‘black Jews’—all groups then rumoured to be conspiring to bring down society. By the 1980s it’s the Mafia or the Russians. Today it’s MI5, the government, or Al-Qaeda.

(Some of our fears, on the other hand, have proved remarkably resilient. Witches, for example, were for many centuries prominent—and malevolent—figures in the popular imagination, as we can see in the quote from Robert Burton on page 21 above. And in the twenty-first century, witches still seem a force to be reckoned with. In one survey, 21 per cent of Americans said they believed in witches. The figure is lower for the UK and Canada, 13 per cent, though this is still higher than one might have guessed. Surprising though these findings might seem, they are as nothing when compared to the hold that ghosts apparently continue to exert over us. In the same survey, 40 per cent of Britons, 37 per cent of Americans, and 28 per cent of Canadians professed a belief in haunted houses.)

Both the Rusk State hospital study and Bleuler’s work focus on the paranoid delusions of people with serious mental illness. But most of us have paranoid thoughts from time to time. Who are we scared of?

If I walk past strangers in the street and they’re laughing, I always suspect they’re laughing at me. Paul, aged 21.

At work, if I’m restocking the shelves and other staff members are nearby, I sometimes think they’re joking and talking about me, but I know they aren’t really. Doreen, aged 58.

I once thought a housemate was trying to steal my possessions because I often caught her in the corridor near my room. I got really wound up about this and ended up locking some of my valuables in the garden shed. I began to have other thoughts—like she was trying to poison me because she was always asking me to eat food she’d cooked and giving me new foreign alcohol to try. Liz, aged 24.

If I’m sitting on the tube and I catch someone’s eye repeatedly, I wonder why they keep looking at me. Chris, aged 30.

These comments are taken from a survey we carried out on a randomly selected sample of the general public. People in the street, as you might say. It turns out that, when it comes to our own personal bogeymen, the range is as diverse as you could imagine. Strangers, workmates, housemates, friends, family—you name it, we’re afraid of them. And sometimes we don’t even have a particular person in mind; instead, we feel a general, non-specific sense of threat.

Incidentally, it might seem from this discussion that there is a clear distinction between the sorts of persecutors conjured by people with severe mental illness and those of us with ‘everyday’ paranoia. The former group tend to worry about external, remote, impersonal threats; the latter about people closer to us. Of course, like all generalizations the reality isn’t so neat. People with, say, schizophrenia are often fearful of family members or neighbours. And many people without mental illness distrust the government or other state agencies. What we can say for sure though is that paranoia will point the finger at anyone. Everyone is a potential threat.

My dad always wanted me to watch the Twilight Zone on television with him. I wouldn't. I had a thing about black and white TV when I was younger, and I am sorry to say that I have as yet never seen an episode. When I received the arc for The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, and The Odyssey of Flight 33 I was intrigued, and I figured that they would make fun reading. I was right.

The Odyssey of Flight 33 caught my attention first. I am always a bit nervous when I fly, and these days of ditching in the Hudson have taken the every day feeling out of boarding a plane. Everything is going according to schedule on the Trans Ocean flight. The stewardesses don't have the kind of tea that a customer wants, others are making annoying small talk. (If you've ever been on a plane, chances are you've experienced these things!) Then all of a sudden, the crew and some passengers feel acceleration. Lots of acceleration. So much so that the instruments aren't even reading the speed anymore, and there is absolutely no contact with the ground.

All of a sudden there is a flash of white light, and things seem to even out. The pilot is eager to see land and brings the plane lower to take a look. Things do not look as they should. They get in touch with Laguardia Airport and ask for permission to land at JFK. The problem is that the folks at Laguardia have not heard of JFK. It hasn't been built yet.

Will Flight 33 ever find its way back to the present?

The Monsters are Due on Maple Street is a much uglier story that encompasses some of the paranoia present in 1950s America as well as the human condition.

The neighbors on Maple Street see what they think is a meteor late on a Saturday afternoon. Shortly thereafter all power is knocked out. Batteries included. Naturally, the folks on the street are confused and a little bit frightened as well. A couple of the men decide that they should go downtown and check out what is going on when young Tommy tells them that they shouldn't go. When questioned, Tommy sites the monster movies that he has seen...aliens never want people to know what is going on.

That's all it takes...a seed of an idea. Soon neighbors are turning on one another, and in true witch hunt fashion, nobody is safe. (This also makes an excellent curriculum connection to our 7th grade study of McCarthyism).

Each of these graphic novels begins with an explanation of the television series as well as a taste Cold War America. The back matter includes information from that particular episode of The Twilight Zone as well as a background about the adaptation of the stories from screen to page.

I have to say, at first I wasn't so sure about today's kids being interested in these books. My worries were completely unfounded. Out of all of our graphic novels, these are the ones that the 6th grade boys are passing from hand to hand. As soon as Jen got them into the hands of one boy, word spread. A few of them even sat SILENTLY during an indoor recess and just read them and passed them round robin style. I know that anytime a new title in the Twilight Zone series comes in, we will no longer even have to try to sell them. Simply put them on display and they take care of themselves.

Daniel and Jason Freeman are the authors of Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear. In the below article written for OUPblog, they examine how paranoia can even affect the health of our children.

Does your child come home from school complaining of aches and pains? Do they, perhaps, suffer from backache?

According to a report issued recently by the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), increasing numbers of children are running the risk of back problems caused by spending the school day jammed into ill-fitting desks and chairs.

And why is school furniture so uncomfortable? Well, according to BESA, it’s because children are so much bigger now - taller, but also heavier. “Although our starting point was not a question of obesity, when we looked the average child today is very different to a child in the 1960s, which is the last time children were actually measured for determining measures of furniture”, remarked BESA’s director general.

We shouldn’t be surprised. In 2003, 27 per cent of children under eleven in England were either overweight or obese. In the US, where different methods to measure obesity are used, nearly 20% of children aged 6-11 were classified as overweight or obese in 2004. The numbers have almost doubled in a decade.

How did so many children get to be overweight before they’ve even reached the ripe old age of eleven? The answer, of course, is a complex one. If adults are eating much less healthily than they used to, so are their kids. Instead of spending their evenings playing outside, children now have the delights of multi-channel TV, computer games, and the Internet to choose from. And then there’s the fact that increasing numbers of us just won’t let our children outside on their own.

More than 40 per cent of UK adults questioned in a recent survey thought that fourteen was the earliest age at which children should be allowed to go out unsupervised. Two-thirds of ten-year-olds have never been to a shop or the park by themselves, and fewer than one in ten eight-year-olds walk to school alone.

What are we so worried about? Well, it’s partly that our children are going to be abducted by a paedophile. And who wouldn’t be worried? All of us can call to mind horrific cases of child abduction and murder. The world seems a much more dangerous place today than it did when we were kids. It’s a world, indeed, in which no sane parent should let their child out of their sight. And if that means our children adopting the sedentary lifestyle of so many adults, that’s a small price to pay.

In fact, despite all our parental vigilance, the number of children murdered in the UK has remained pretty much constant over the past 30 years – around 60-80. In most of those cases, a parent is the principal suspect. In 2006, 55 children were killed in England and Wales; 12 were murdered by strangers. In the US, between 40 and 150 children are abducted and murdered per year (in around 14% of cases, the killer turns out to be the child’s parent).

These are grim statistics, but they’re a drop in the ocean compared to the risks our kids are running by not going out. The number of obese of overweight children in the UK and US runs to millions. The less we exercise, the more likely it is that we’ll become overweight. And the more overweight we are, the greater the chances of us developing serious illnesses like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and arthritis. So why, when the risks to our children of a sedentary lifestyle are so much greater than the risks of letting them out on their own, do we persist in ferrying them to school and allowing them to spend so much time in their bedrooms playing computer games?

Part of the explanation is simply that we’re not good at comparing risks. We’re more frightened of events that almost certainly won’t happen (abduction) than things that quite possibly will (obesity).
Psychologists have a familiar word for the exaggerated or unfounded fear that other people (for example, paedophiles) want to harm us: paranoia. And over the past decade, a slew of research studies have suggested that it’s much more common than anyone had previously suspected.

In fact, paranoia affects up to a quarter of us at any one time. It’s as common as depression and there are good reasons for thinking it may be on the rise, not least the tendency of the media to over-report sensational but relatively rare dangers – such as the murder of a child. The way our minds function makes us particularly susceptible to the media. The more something is repeated, and the more graphic and emotional it is, the greater the impression it makes upon us. This is why people consistently tell surveys that crime rates are rising, even though for the last decade or so they’ve been falling. It’s why they overestimate the chances of dying in a violent incident and underestimate the risk of dying from a stroke. And it’s why rates of post traumatic stress disorder in New Yorkers after 9/11 correlate directly with the amount of TV coverage of the catastrophe they watched. Our perception of risk becomes skewed.

It’s time to wise up to paranoia. We need to recognise how widespread it is, and understand both how it can be triggered and how it can be challenged. The health of our children may depend on it.