Word: dolnick
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...Edward Dolnick, a journalist, centers his story on Charley Hill, a London undercover cop raised mostly in the U.S. who has made a specialty of tracking down purloined Goyas and Bruegels before they are fenced to Bahrain or, worse, ditched in a trash compactor. It's one of Hill's missions in life to disabuse people of the idea that art thieves are cultivated smoothies. "The thieves who steal works of art," he tells us, "were usually stealing hubcaps a few years earlier...
...Dolnick reminds us that the most famous artworks have a way of turning up, although sometimes not for years. Meanwhile, they can make appearances in surprising places. There's even an art-world in joke in Dr. No, the 1962 film that introduces James Bond. On a wall of the evil doctor's Caribbean hideaway, you can spot Goya's portrait The Duke of Wellington, famously stolen the year before from the National Gallery in London. So far, though, there is no sign of The Scream version taken last year, not even in the movies. --By Richard Lacayo
...Madness on the Couch, Edward Dolnick, a veteran science writer for Health magazine and The Boston Globe, explores how Rosen-type therapists saturated the psychoanalytic profession with bad science, unearned hubris and treatment that was patently dangerous to patients and families. Dolnick does not launch into a diatribe against all forms of psychotherapy. Although psychotherapy can be effective for treating neuroses (relatively benign emotional disorders), Dolnick targets psychoanalysts who tried to cure psychoses (marked disorders of perception or reality) with talk therapy alone. From the 1940s to the 1970s an aggressive cabal of psychoanalysts fit such a bill; they scoffed...
...Dolnick begins in the 1940s when psychoanalysis first became fashionable. At the end of the second World War, society--consumed by the nature versus nurture effects on behavior--came up on the side of nurture, believing that personality was shaped by the environment. Anything related to genetics sounded disarmingly like eugenics and Hitler's notion of racial superiority. And so society welcomed psychotherapy, with its egalitarian tenet that we are all "brothers" whose personalities are shaped (or misshaped) by our surroundings. As Dolnick observes, "Level-headed men and women occasionally succumb to giddy excitement over the stock market...
...Although Dolnick's delivers a fascinating, often riveting, narrative of psychoanalytic history, the narrative style is a little unsatisfying. Dolnick zealously reports on the history of false theories and therapists, but focuses comparatively little on the patients themselves. Dolnick infers that lives were ruined by dozens of Rosen-type fanatics who blamed psychotic illness on patients, on mothers, on families--on everything, it seems, except biology. But beyond these inferences, Dolnick delves very little into the lives of the people affected--and how (or if) they ever recovered from it. What Dolnick focuses on instead is the professional consequences...