Review of An Affair of Honor (Hardcover)

Thepageturner's review (below) inspired me to get this book, and Marius's hypnotic writing kept me reading it, almost non-stop. This is a huge, panoramic novel of 1950's Tennessee, set in Bourbonville, also the setting for After the War, and involving later generations of some of the same families. Hope Kirby's killing of his wife and her lover start the spiralling action in this thoughtful, but exciting, novel and provide the forum for the author's extended study of the different ways we define justice and seek retribution.

Charles Alexander, a college student and newspaper reporter who accidentally witnesses the double murder, escapes being executed by Kirby only because he promises not to tell what he's seen.Charles, however, eventually becomes overwhelmed with guilt and confesses to the sheriff that he was a witness.While this action might seem on the surface to be clearly a correct action, it is not so simple in Bourbonville, where many believe the "code of the hills" is inviolate and Charles's breaking of his word of honor to be a serious betrayal.Even the clergy get in on the action, some advocating that he retract his statement, and Charles finds himself with few friends and even fewer supporters.

Plenty of drama, and even melodrama, keep the reader going, and the pages fly by, as we become totally caught up in the plot and in the lives of the characters, all of whom face demons of some sort.Marius is a master of keeping mysteries alive and making us understand and care for these characters, even those we dislike or consider misguided, because he makes us share their experiences, often through flashbacks. The complexities of religious faith, which we see as Charles and many other characters battle their doubts, are brought into sharp focus as we also share the traumas many characters have experienced during World War II, traumas still affecting both their earthly and spiritual lives.Marius takes on the big questions and provides a fascinating novel in which love and justice sometimes seem ineffable goals in a society which often honors tradition and shared community values far more than humanity and individual worth.Mary Whipple



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Review of Talking About Therapy (Hardcover)

This book of vignettes about people's experiences in and opinions about their own therapies was excellent...truly informative.As a therapist myself, I found it appealing and worth the read, especially with the people who were in therapy in the forties and fifties, because I don't hear enough of that perspective.I also liked the range of people and therapy types the book covered...though granted, it only covered a certain portion of those in therapy (i.e. entirely lacking any racially minority voices, said nothing about purely supportive therapy, didn't touch all the patients whose Medicaid pays for their therapy...).

The book's main drawback, however, was that its authors tried to make it into something it really wasn't...They tried to make it into a textbook or reference book of sorts, something more than just a collection of vignettes.They (ironically, like so many therapists) had to get in their own two cents constantly, and did it by fleshing everything out with theory, explanations, long-winded chapter and vignette introductions, summaries, recaps, expansions on themes, tepid historical insights...PURE DULLNESS, but moreso, unnecessary.Once I realized where the real power of the book lay, I just skipped over everything the authors had to say (or almost everything...at times they said an interesting thing or two about a famous therapist) and read the words of the people themselves, and worth it they were!

One last criticism:the authors feigned objectivity in describing different schools of therapy, but time and time again their stilted points of view seeped through.One example I can think of offhand was their explanation for why psychoanalysts are slow "to endorse" psychotropic medications:they said it was "because some of their patients have progressed without them and [because of their sometimes intolerable] side effects."While these may both be perfectly true reasons, they fail to mention the main reason I MYSELF don't endorse them - because, as Alice Miller says (and interestingly, her book Drama of the Gifted Child is mentioned glowingly several times in various vignettes), medications reduce symptoms, and symptoms provide the clue that allows people to trace emotionally their own traumas back into their childhoods...and thus heal.Medication lops off the symptom, gives temporary relief, but prevents deeper healing!



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