Schizophrenia: Science and Practice brings together the work of many of today's most distinguished authorities in psychiatry. From diverse perspectives, these specialists review what is presently known—and unknown—about schizophrenia. The conceptual underpinnings of the diagnosis of schizophrenic illness, recent elaborations of psychosocial and developmental theories, current genetic and biochemical research, and traditional as well as newer treatment approaches are among the topics discussed in this unusually clear and lively account.

How effective are contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches to schizophrenia? What drug therapies are being used or proposed, and why? What about the treatment milieu and the difficult strategic questions surrounding the recent movement toward the “deinstitutionalization” of schizophrenic patients? Ultimately, should schizophrenia be defined as a toxic illness or as a way of life? In attempting to answer these and other questions, Dr. Shershow is joined by contributors Irwin Savodnik, Seymour Kety, Theodore Udz, Gerald Klerman, Ian Creese, Solomon Snyder, Leo Hollister, Jonathan Borus, Daniel Schwartz, and Loren Mosher, among others.

All the issues confronting psychiatry as a self-conscious discipline within contemporary medicine converge on the problem of schizophrenia. The important hope Schizophrenia: Science and Practice raises is that a fruitful pluralism among the variety of approaches to schizophrehia, and to psychiatric problems in general, can be sustained.

A clarion call for a new approach to feminist thought. In this major work, Carolyn Dever considers the ambivalence or outright hostility many feminists feel toward theory, arguing that a fundamental skepticism toward abstraction has been vital to the development of the movement. Dever analyzes the politics of feminist theory by looking at its popular, activist, and academic modes, from the liberation movements of the 1970s to gender and queer studies now. Using key moments in the history of modern feminism--consciousness-raising, best-selling books like Sexual Politics by Kate Millett and The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and media representations of women's struggle for equality--Dever outlines heated debates over psychoanalysis, sexuality, and activism. The abstract and the grounded converge in discussions about the relationship between the feminist mind and the feminist body and in the preoccupation, both uneasy and utopian, with lesbian sexuality. Powerful, illuminating, and galvanizing, Skeptical Feminism traces the strategies the women's movement has used to make theory matter--and points toward a new, politically engaged approach to feminist thought. Carolyn Dever is associate professor of English and acting director of women's studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud (1998) and coeditor (with Margaret Cohen) of The Literary Channel (2002).

Equality is the endangered species of political ideals. Even left-of-center politicians reject equality as an ideal: government must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its citizens be equal in any dimension. In his new book Ronald Dworkin insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern, and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that distribution.

What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles--first, it is of equal objective importance that all human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life--to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood except in the context of actual and complex political issues, Dworkin develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.