Search results for ""Author Theodore Dalrymple""

In Spoilt Rotten, social commentator Theodore Dalrymple (Our Culture or What is Left of It, 2009) grinds his axe at our sentimentality-centric culture where feelings have become the yardstick of everything we do: safe driving, education, taking of responsibility (none), sentimentality (everywhere). In this forensic polemic of maudlin popular culture from X-factor to Super Nannies, Dalrymple wields his scalpel at all our modern sacred cows. Children will be speechless, for once, parents will hang their heads in shame!

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This new collection of essays by the author of Life at the Bottom bears the unmistakable stamp of Theodore Dalrymple's bracingly clearsighted view of the human condition. In these pieces, Dr. Dalrymple ranges over literature and ideas, from Shakespeare to Marx, from the breakdown of Islam to the legalization of drugs. Here is a book that restores our faith in the central importance of literature and criticism to our civilization. Theodore Dalrymple is the best doctor-writer since William Carlos Williams. —Peggy Noonan. Includes When Islam Breaks Down, named the best journal article of 2004 by David Brooks of the New York Times.

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Here is a searing account-probably the best yet published-of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does. Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives. Drawn from the pages of the cutting-edge political and cultural quarterly City Journal, Dalrymple's book draws upon scores of eye-opening, true-life vignettes that are by turns hilariously funny, chillingly horrifying, and all too revealing-sometimes all at once. And Dalrymple writes in prose that transcends journalism and achieves the quality of literature.

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The New England Journal of Medicine is one of the most important general medical journals in the world. Doctors rely on the conclusions it publishes, and most do not have the time to look beyond abstracts to examine methodology or question assumptions. Many of its pronouncements are conveyed by the media to a mass audience, which is likely to take them as authoritative. But is this trust entirely warranted? Theodore Dalrymple, a doctor retired from practice, turned a critical eye upon a full year of the Journal, alert to dubious premises and to what is left unsaid. In False Positive, he demonstrates that many of the papers it publishes reach conclusions that are not only flawed, but obviously flawed. He exposes errors of reasoning and conspicuous omissions apparently undetected by the editors. In some cases, there is reason to suspect actual corruption. When the Journal takes on social questions, its perspective is solidly politically correct. Practically no debate on social issues appears in the printed version, and highly debatable points of view go unchallenged. The Journal reads as if there were only one possible point of view, though the American medical profession (to say nothing of the extensive foreign readership) cannot possibly be in total agreement with the stances taken in its pages. It is thus more megaphone than sounding board. There is indeed much in the New England Journal of Medicine that deserves praise and admiration. But this book should encourage the general reader to take a constructively critical view of medical news and to be wary of the latest medical doctrines.

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Theodore Dalrymple believes that almost everything people know about opiate addiction is wrong. Most flawed of all is the notion that addicts are in touch with profound mysteries of which non-addicts are ignorant. Dalrymple shows that doctors, psychologists and social workers, all of them uncritically accepting addicts' descriptions of addiction, have employed literary myths (drugs are creative and intense) in constructing an equal and opposite myth of quasi-treatment. Using evidence from literature and pharmacology and drawing on examples from his own clinical experience, Dalrymple shows that addiction is not a disease, but a response to personal and existential problems. He argues that withdrawal from opiates is not the serious medical condition, but a relatively trivial experience and says that criminality causes addiction far more often than addiction causes criminality.

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Today, the word prejudice has come to seem synonymous with bigotry; therefore the only way a person can establish freedom from bigotry is by claiming to have wiped his mind free from prejudice. English psychiatrist and writer Theodore Dalrymple shows that freeing the mind from prejudice is not only impossible, but entails intellectual, moral and emotional dishonesty. The attempt to eradicate prejudice has several dire consequences for the individual and society as a whole.

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