The Andersen Library Blog

As I write, the number six best seller on Amazon.com is nonfiction. It’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) by the American Psychiatric Association. This could change next hour, as the list is updated that often, but for the time being, the DSM-5 is hovering near the apex of the Amazon Best Sellers list of top 100 titles, which it has been on for 87 days.

The DSM-5 is not casual reading, although many lay persons (typically patients) do consult it, but is rather aimed at specialists such as clinicians, researchers, insurers, and students in those fields. According to its preface, it is “intended to serve as a practical, functional, and flexible guide for organizing information that can aid in the accurate diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders.” Why is it important for you to know about the DSM-5? It can be consulted to find higher quality information than might be found by searching the Internet. According to the DSM-5 Development website, it “contains a listing of diagnostic criteria for every psychiatric disorder recognized by the U.S. healthcare system.” For consistency’s sake, it also coordinates with the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases. The DSM-5 may not be a riveting classic, but it has it’s value.

What can the DSM-5 tell you? Let’s say, hypothetically, that a doctor has diagnosed you with a caffeine-related disorder. Specifically, you are experiencing caffeine withdrawal (292.0 [F15.93]). In the Manual you will find diagnostic criteria and features, prevalence, development and course, risk and prognostic features, and other important information. In this case, you will find that:

1. You are not alone, since “more than 85% of adults and children in the United States regularly consume caffeine”
2. You demonstrate “the presence of a characteristic withdrawal syndrome that develops after the abrupt cessation of (or substantial reduction in) prolonged daily caffeine ingestion,” such as headache or fatigue
3. You experience symptoms that “can vary from mild to extreme, at times causing functional impairment in normal daily activities”
4. You may feel bad for a while, as “symptoms usually begin 12–24 hours after the last caffeine dose” and may “last for 2–9 days, with the possibility of withdrawal headaches occurring for up to 21 days”

All this and more is available at your fingertips.

Opinions on the DSM-5 vary. Amazon’s Customer Reviews are all over the place, with the vast majority of reviewers giving it either one or five stars. Why the divisiveness? You can check in with some of those more in the know. In DSM-5: An Overview of Changes and Controversies , Jerome C. Wakefield selectively surveys “what is new in DSM-5, why changes were made, and what about them is so controversial.” (Clinical Social Work Journal, May 22, 2013). There are also reviews available free online, such as How Psychiatry Went Crazy by Carol Tavris in the Wall Street Journal, The New Crisis in Confidence in Psychiatric Diagnosis by Allen Frances in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and Director’s Blog: Transforming Diagnosis by Thomas Insel on the National Institute of Mental Health website. There are even books devoted to the bigger mental illness picture, such as Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life, which is held at UW-Madison and UW-Stout, and will soon be available for checkout using UW Request.

If you’d like to consult the DSM-5 or just give it the once over, try Andersen Library’s online copy. To get to it, access the DSM IV-TR Online and click on the DSM-5 tab. Either use the Advanced Search and limit to “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition” before you run your search, or run your search in the default search box that appears on the screen, then rerun it by changing “Journals” to “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition” and pressing the search (magnifying glass) icon again.

As for me, writing this review has given me a headache. Or maybe that’s because I forgot my morning cup of joe. Either way, I’m going to sign off.

Have a great day and remember to always check with your health care professional for an official diagnosis and treatment recommendations.

Another week, another book! This week I’m tackling The Washington Post paperback fiction bestsellers list, which is topped by The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. If you haven’t been to the movies lately you may be wondering at the resurgence of interest in this classic. The reason is that there’s a new Baz Luhrmann film adaption of the novel that’s probably playing in a theatre near you. It’s playing in Whitewater as I write. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway. It just dropped out of the top 10 highest weekend gross, according to Box Office Mojo: Weekend Box Office, but had previously been there for several weeks. Of the older adaptations, I was most impressed by the 1974 version with Robert Redford, but I’ve heard anecdotally from my friends that this new one is fabulous. The critics don’t seem to agree. See what The Washington Post, New York Times, and Madison.com have to say about it.

Anyway, back to the book. Although not a smash hit in it’s day, 1925, it has since become an important novel of the era. If you didn’t have to read The Great Gatsby in high school, here is an opportunity for you to do so now. If you want to start with a plot outline, check out this Masterplots entry in the Literary Reference Center database. Just beware, spoilers are given. In a nutshell, Nick Carraway, a bonds salesman originally fron the midwest, moves in jazz age Long Island high society with his cousin Daisy Buchanan and the racketeer Jay Gatsby. At the beginning things look good, but then they go awry. The book is a fine example of social realism, featuring strong elements of romance, wealth and the American Dream.

If you’d like to read reviews or criticism of the novel, you can find those in MLA International Bibliography, Literary Reference Center, and other databases. In the former, do a subject search for: The Great Gatsby to find literary criticism of the novel. In the latter, you can run this search: “great gatsby” not (film* or movie* or “motion picture*”) then limit to either “literary criticism” or “reviews” on the left side to find relevant articles from journals, magazines or books.

Andersen Library has several copies of The Great Gatsby for you to choose from. If there are multiple versions found, click on the title to see what they are. One of them is even an audiobook, if you prefer that format. If those are checked out, try to get the novel using UW Request. If you do it will get here in just a few days at no cost to you. Either way you can have the book for four weeks.

If you’ve already read The Great Gatsby and loved it, you might want to look in the NoveList database for read-alikes. Several of these were also made into movies, so you have the viewing option as well the reading option. (I’m not going to analyze how the movies may differ from the books…you’ll have to do that yourself.) A few that NoveList recommends are:

• An Object of Beauty (2010) by Steve Martin – because it is an atmospheric book featuring “opulence, social climbing, and [the] wide-ranging disaster” and “the deception of a social climber amid wealthy New Yorkers”
• Oil! by Upton Sinclair (1927) – because it is an atmospheric book about “American financial power, greed, and the high-life of the early Twentieth Century” that was made into a movie (There Will be Blood)
• Howards End (1910) by E. M. Forster – because it is a stylistically complex book about rich people that has been made into a movie
• The Lincoln Lawyer (2005) by Michael Connelly – because it is an atmospheric book about rich people that has been made into a movie

I hope you enjoy or have enjoyed The Great Gatsby. Either way, let us know your opinion.

Have you read Inferno by Dan Brown? It’s number one on the New York Times “Combined Print & E-Book Fiction” Best Sellers list right now and was last week too. Here are some ways to get it and to find similar or related books to read.

The Andersen Library’s copy is checked out at the moment and there are several holds on it, but you can try to borrow one of the available copies at another UW system library for free using UW Request through Research@UWW.

Want to know more about Inferno before you request it? You can read an excerpt of it on www.danbrown.com that will really suck you in. Basically there’s this clever guy, Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor, who gets entangled with a riddle regarding Dante’s The Divine Comedy in, where else, Italy. (I don’t want to give too much away.)

I’m really looking forward to reading Inferno, because I’ve enjoyed Brown’s other Robert Langdon books: Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol. If you haven’t read those and like intellectual suspense stories where brains trump brawn in the discovery of answers, I highly recommend them. As I type, those are on the shelf, so you can come right here and check them out. This Dan Brown Research@UWW search will show you which Dan Brown books and videos we have, and where to find them.

If you’re not familiar with Dan Brown’s fiction and would like some short synopses of what he’s written, check out his entry on Fantastic Fiction out of the UK. A bonus feature of the site are author “recommends” at the bottom of each main entry, where the author, in this case Dan Brown, makes some suggestions on other fiction for you to read. Usually these are in the same genre that the author writes in so you might get some ideas for further reading.

I’m also a fan of NoveList, one of the Andersen Library’s databases, for finding information about authors, their works, reviews of the works, and “read-alikes.” In the entry for Dan Brown, eight similar authors are listed on the right, such as Raymond Khoury, John Case, and Ian Caldwell. If you search for a specific book, in addition to the summary, subjects and reviews you’ll see, there are titles of similar books on the right. For example, the record for Inferno is already in the database, and in that record eight suggested book titles are listed and each title can be clicked on for further information. One of the most beguiling is The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper, which involves riddles from Milton’s Paradise Lost and is set in Italy too. I’ll have to put that on my reading list as well!

It isn’t necessary, but if you have the time while you’re waiting for Inferno to become available, you might want to glance over The Divine Comedy. There you could find some hidden nuggets of information to help you unravel the mystery in Inferno. This out of copyright classic is available for free online in many locations, such as Project Gutenberg and Google Books, both of which have copies of a version translated by Henry F. Cary.

Now that you’re prepped for Inferno and it’s literary universe, I’ll turn you loose to enjoy some summer reading.