Faculty Bibliography

The author reflects upon Hurricane Sandy and the massive loss of power it caused. The author realized how technologically dependent we are and how vulnerable our technology is to acts of nature-a nature we do not nurture, in part because of our devotion to technology. Two reviews, one of a textbook and the other a game are introduced. Both texts involve seizing imaginative and interactive new opportunities to figure out the world of childhood and to help suffering children; both are accessible to children, raising a new set of questions; and both breach standard national boundaries precisely because of their technologies.

Parents, of course, dominate the gene and the environment. In this month's Book Forum, Stewart Adelson and Alexander Westphal review Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon's vast new book, in which he finds groups of people whose identities are, in some spectacular or visible way, abruptly different from those of their parents. These are identities that typically surprise, shock, disappoint, and frighten. Solomon's humanistic investigation revolves around a nice metaphor for understanding the way these identities are formed: horizontal identities.

The article focuses on two book reviews included in the current issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. For much of psychiatry's modern history, psychiatrists have paid special attention to motherhood. The attention has not always been reciprocated or appreciated. Recently, things have changed. A more expansive, integrative, and imaginative approach has been taken. Studies of parenthood have become more sophisticated, building on a history of scrutiny that is not always as damning as it might at first seem. With this deepening interest in families has common interest in fatherhood across academic specialties. the books are informative, but the question of their clinical utility is raised. In particular, the books miss or skirt the relation of fatherhood to mental health. That may be because these multidisciplinary books lack our input. Like fathers of yore, our profession may still be seen as too cold and distant; or it may be that we are still lagging, at least as far as the other actors in the discourse are concerned.