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Product Description
内容説明
Whybrow describes an affluence in America that far outstrips need and a rampant greed spawning the addictions of consumer culture--food, money and technology. Citing the alarming statistics of obesity, depression and panic disorders, Whybrow points to forms of behaviour that are testing the limits of America's ancestral biology--in mind and body--and threaten to erode the very foundations of American community. Drawing upon case studies, Whybrow offers guidance and a vantage point from which to understand America's most pressing social and medical issues. This provocative volume, grounded in science and philosophy, calls for collective action in refocusing the pursuit of happiness and enhancing America's prosperity.
From Publishers Weekly
The indictment of American society offered here—that America's supercharged free-market capitalism shackles us to a treadmill of overwork and overconsumption, frays family and community ties and leaves us anxious, alienated and overweight—is familiar. What's more idiosyncratic and compelling is the author's grounding his treatise in political economy (citing everyone from Adam Smith to Thorstein Veblen) as well as in neuropsychiatry, primatology and genetics. Psychiatrist Whybrow (Mood Apart) diagnoses a form of clinical mania in which "the dopamine reward systems of the brain are... hijacked" by pleasurable frenzies like the Internet bubble. Genes are to blame: programmed to crave material rewards on the austere savanna, they go bananas in an economy of superabundance. Americans are particularly susceptible because they are descended from immigrants with a higher frequency of the "exploratory and novelty-seeking D4-7 allele" in the dopamine receptor system, which predisposes them to impulsivity and addiction. The malady is "treatable," Whybrow asserts, not with Paxil but with a vaguely defined program of communitarianism and recovery therapeutics, exemplified by his friends Peanut, a farmer rooted in the land, and Tom, a formerly manic entrepreneur who has learned to live in the present moment. Whybrow's analysis of the contemporary rat race is acute, and by medicalizing the problem he locates it in behavior and genetics—away from the arena of conventional political and economic action where more systemic solutions might surface, but toward a place where individual responsibility can turn "self-interest into social fellowship."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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AN OLD MOON RETREATS before a December dawn. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
AN OLD MOON RETREATS before a December dawn. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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