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January Magazine has kind words for Jem Poster's Rifling Shadows, now on sale in bookstores everywhere: "It sounds like hyperbole but I don’t care: Jem Poster’s sophomore effort, Rifling Paradise (Overlook) is as near perfect a book as I have encountered in a very long time. It is a work of historical fiction and the history here -- Australia in the Victorian era -- is pitch perfect. Rifling Paradise looks like a book, but it is not: it’s really a time machine.The story finds minor English landowner, Charles Redbourne, heading to Australia to make an impression as a naturalist, at a time when that was a weirdly competitive field. If Rifling Paradise was just Redbourne’s story, it would be interesting enough: it would be a good book. But when Redbourne’s specimen collecting takes a terrifying turn, we find ourselves with a page turner on our hands.So what is Rifling Paradise? Is it historical fiction? Literary fiction? Is it a psychological thriller? Or the portrait of an age? Well, actually, it’s all of those things. And more. A wonderful book."

Jem Poster's new novel Rifling Paradise gets a positive nod in next week's Publishers Weekly: "Destitution and scandal drive 19th century British gentleman Charles Redbourne on a voyage to Australia in Poster’s atmospheric second novel. Charles hopes to collect specimens of rare wildlife, but his trip soon goes literally and figuratively offtrack. His stay with a family friend is unsettled by his host’s daughter, a volatile artist with a troubled past. Bullen, his expedition manager, clashes violently with their porter, Billy Preece, deriding the servant’s guidance, even though Billy’s Aboriginal heritage provides their only authentic connection to the untamed land they traverse. As the journey devolves toward danger and even death, Poster (Courting Shadows) evokes complex Victorian attitudes toward nature, culture, progress and science. Charles is a compelling portrait of a man moving uneasily among conflicting possibilities of his time."

From Booknotes, the newsletter of the fabulous Elliott Bay Book Co. in downtown Seattle: "The year is 1881: Young architect John Stannard is sent from London to a rural part of England to make repairs on the village church. Tearing down walls, burning the pews, and unearthing the dead, Stannard pays no heed to the voices of protest that surround him. While not at work he devotes himself to emotionally tormenting a beautiful young local girl by the name of Ann Rosewell. Jem Poster presents a scathing look at the battleground between the sacred and profane. Thought provoking, coolly elegant, and rich in detail, this novel is sure to be a success." -J. Ditzel

Courting Shadows in reviewed on Entertainment Weekly online: "John Stannard, the narrator of Jem Poster's debut novel, Courting Shadows, is an insufferable snob. Hired to oversee repairs on a medieval church in a remote British village in the 19th century, the class-conscious Stannard treats his unrefined workers with arrogance. He's insensitive to the church's cleric and cruel to a seductive lass with whom he shared a flash of uncharacteristic bliss. It's risky placing such an unsympathetic, humorless character front and center. Poster keeps us engaged with prose that captures suffocating Victorian restraint, and a finale that doesn’t let the disagreeable prig off the hook." B - By Tim Purtell

Robert L. Klitzman, MD, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, discusses a chapter in his book, When Doctors Become Patients, about how spiritual choices may affect a clinician’s relationship and or judgment with patients here. To read an excerpt from the book click here.

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Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, Second Edition by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison chronicles the medical treatment of manic and depressive episodes, strategies for preventing future episodes, and psychotherapeutic issues common in this illness. In the excerpt below the authors introduce their second edition.

It has been 17 years since the publication of the first edition of this text; they have been the most explosively productive years in the history of medical science. In every field relevant to our understanding of manic-depressive illness—genetics, neurobiology, psychology and neuropsychology, neuroanatomy, diagnosis, and treatment—we have gained a staggering amount of knowledge. Scientists and clinicians have gone an impressive distance toward fulfilling the hopes articulated by Emil Kraepelin in the introduction to his 1899 textbook on psychiatry. (more…)

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Earlier today, Mary Ann Cohen, co-editor of the Comprehensive Textbook of AIDS Psychiatry helped us better understand the AIDS epidemic in young American men. Cohen’s book (with Jack M. Gorman), navigates the ample evidence supporting the fact that psychiatric treatment can decrease transmission, diminish suffering, improve adherence, and decrease morbidity and mortality in AIDS patients. In the excerpt below, Jimmie Holland, MD the Wayne E. Chapman Chair in Psychiatric Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University provides a forward which puts the Comprehensive Textbook of AIDS Psychiatry into historical perspective.

The publication of the Comprehensive Textbook of AIDS Psychiatry, edited by two psychiatrists who have ‘‘been there’’ since the beginning of the epidemic, is a benchmark for the field —it has come of age. (more…)

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A little while back someone in the office pointed out this interesting piece about the rise of AIDS among young men in NYC. I started wondering what could be done and I took my query to Mary Ann Cohen a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and the co-editor of the Comprehensive Textbook of AIDS Psychiatry. Cohen wrote me back with the following illuminating response.

During a century when rapid advances in medicine led to near eradication of infectious diseases throughout much of the world, the emergence of HIV infection in 1981 led to an unexpected crisis in health care that has not yet resolved. (more…)

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Robert Klitzman, author of the upcoming book When Doctors Become Patients is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University. He was recently interviewed about the personal injury lawyer out of Atlanta, Andrew Speaker, who traveled to Europe after being diagnosed with a drug resistant form of tuberculosis. Here the podcast here.

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