front cover of Neil Young
Neil Young
American Traveller
Martin Halliwell
Reaktion Books, 2015
When Neil Young left Canada in 1966 to move to California, it was the beginning of an extraordinary musical journal that would leave song after song resonating across the landscapes of North America. From “Ohio” to “Albuquerque,” Young’s fascination with America’s many places profoundly influenced his eclectic style and helped shape the restless sensibility of his generation. In this book, Martin Halliwell shows how place has loomed large in Young’s prodigious catalog of songs, which are themselves a testament to his storied career as a musician playing with bands such as Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse, and, of course, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
           
Moving from the Canadian prairies to Young’s adopted Pacific home, Halliwell explores how place and travel spurred one of the most prolific creative outputs in music history. Placing Young in the shifting musical milieus of the past decades—comprised of artists such as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, the Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Devo, and Pearl Jam—he traces the ways Young’s personal journeys have intertwined with that of American music and how both capture the power of America’s great landscapes.
           
Spanning Young’s career as a singer-songwriter—from his many bands to his work on films—Neil Young will appeal not just to his many fans worldwide but to anyone interested in the extraordinary ways American music has engaged the places from which it comes. 
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front cover of Therapeutic Revolutions
Therapeutic Revolutions
Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945-1970
Halliwell, Martin
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Therapeutic Revolutions examines the evolving relationship between American medicine, psychiatry, and culture from World War II to the dawn of the 1970s. In this richly layered intellectual history, Martin Halliwell ranges from national politics, public reports, and healthcare debates to the ways in which film, literature, and the mass media provided cultural channels for shaping and challenging preconceptions about health and illness.

Beginning with a discussion of the profound impact of World War II and the Cold War on mental health, Halliwell moves from the influence of work, family, and growing up in the Eisenhower years to the critique of institutional practice and the search for alternative therapeutic communities during the 1960s. Blending a discussion of such influential postwar thinkers as Erich Fromm, William Menninger, Erving Goffman, Erik Erikson, and Herbert Marcuse with perceptive readings of a range of cultural text that illuminate mental health issues--among them Spellbound, Shock Corridor, Revolutionary Road, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden--this compelling study argues that the postwar therapeutic revolutions closely interlink contrasting discourses of authority and liberation.
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front cover of Transformed States
Transformed States
Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture, 1990-2020
Martin Halliwell
Rutgers University Press
Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the Covid-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post-Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century.
 
The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts in the arenas of cloning, reproduction, artificial intelligence, longevity, gender affirmation, vaccination and environmental health. Interweaving politics and culture, the book illustrates how these health issues are reflected in and challenged by literary and cinematic texts, from Oryx and Crake to Annihilation, and from Gattaca to Avatar.
 
By assessing the complex relationship between federal politics and the biomedical industry, Transformed States develops an ecological approach to public health that moves beyond tensions between state governance and private enterprise. To that end, Martin Halliwell analyses thirty years that radically transformed American science, medicine, and policy, positioning biotechnology in dialogue with fears and fantasies about an emerging future in which health is ever more contested.
 
Along with the two earlier books, Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017), Transformed States is the final volume of a landmark cultural and intellectual history of mental health in the United States, journeying from the combat zones of World War II to the global emergency of Covid-19.
 
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front cover of Voices of Mental Health
Voices of Mental Health
Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970-2000
Halliwell, Martin
Rutgers University Press, 2017
This dynamic and richly layered account of mental health in the late twentieth century interweaves three important stories: the rising political prominence of mental health in the United States since 1970; the shifting medical diagnostics of mental health at a time when health activists, advocacy groups, and public figures were all speaking out about the needs and rights of patients; and the concept of voice in literature, film, memoir, journalism, and medical case study that connects the health experiences of individuals to shared stories.

Together, these three dimensions bring into conversation a diverse cast of late-century writers, filmmakers, actors, physicians, politicians, policy-makers, and social critics. In doing so, Martin Halliwell’s Voices of Mental Health breaks new ground in deepening our understanding of the place, politics, and trajectory of mental health from the moon landing to the millennium. 
 
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