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Phyllis A. Whitney died on Friday. She was 104 years old.

Whitney's books were a large part of my high school reading life, along with Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt and Daphne DuMaurier.

Whenever there is something to be explained to small people, I usually turn to books. Having the right book to broach subjects like sadness and grief can be a godsend. Michael Rosen’s Sad Book is one of those, though I would advise a solitary reading before sitting down with the children, as its understated language, poetry really, is overwhelmingly emotive. As Rosen explained in an interview, he wrote the book following the death of his eighteen-year-old son Eddie. During school visits, children used to ask him what became of Eddie, following his appearances in previous books.

“When I said, ‘He’s dead,’ you’d see the kids just nodding, ‘Oh, right, that’s what happened, is it?’ Very matter of fact.” Which may be how Rosen had the sense that children could handle the material in his Sad Book, a book that, quite simply, makes sense of sadness.

Quentin Blake’s illustrations are integral to conveying the depths of emotion and actually draw children in to the meaning by offering scenarios which may touch parallels with their own lives. Rosen is not coming up with easy, pat answers. His grief will never go away – but he does talk about how he deals with it and the small but effective ways he can be kind to himself that mean the grief is not allowed to take over his whole life. It’s not a book to be picked up lightly but it offers a chance to reflect and can help children realise they don’t have to be isolated when they are feeling deeply sad.

Earlier today we posted a Q & A with Allan V. Horwitz, co-author with Jerome C. Wakefield, of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder. Below is an excerpt from the book which uses Willy Loman from Death of A Salesman to show how our perceptions of sadness have changed over time.

The Concept of Depression

The poet W. H. Auden famously deemed the period after World War II the “age of anxiety.” For Auden, the intense anxiety of that era was a normal human response to extraordinary circumstances, such as the devastation of modern warfare, the horrors of the concentration camps, the development of nuclear weapons, and the tensions of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Were Auden still alive, he might conclude that the era around the turn of the twenty-first century is the “age of depression.” (more…)

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Amid claims that one out of ten Americans suffer from Depression, and that 25% succumb at some point in their lives, Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield argue in their new book, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder that, while depressive disorder certainly exists, the apparent epidemic in fact reflects the way the psychiatric profession has understood and reclassified normal human sadness as largely an abnormal experience. Allan V. Horwitz, PhD, is a Professor of Sociology and Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Rutgers University and has been kind enough to answer a few questions about his new book for us. Check back later today for an excerpt.

OUP: In your introduction you mention that you work in the sociology of stress. Can you explain what it is and how it led you to work on this particular book with Dr. Wakefield? (more…)

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An emotional Carol Burnett payed tribute to her good friend Beverly Sills on NPR this week.

Beverly Sills died on Monday, July 2.
I loved Sills's bubbling laugh and glorious voice.

She was an American original.

Beverly Sills Online
New York Times