Theodore Dalrymple

An inspired anthology in stunning hardcover about physical and psychological illness, healing, and healers--featuring a brilliant array of classic and contemporary writers, from Anton Chekhov to Lorrie Moore. This unique anthology gathers fictional tales of sickness and of healing, both physical and psychological, from a wide variety of times and perspectives. Some of these writers were themselves physicians, notably Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov's story, taken from A Country Doctor's Notebook, draws on his early experience as a young doctor in rural Russia a century ago, while Anna Kavan's story, from her collection Asylum Piece, is based on her experience of mental illness. Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, J. G. Ballard, Robert Heinlein, and Lorrie Moore are among the other writers of medical adventures that fill these pages. From Chekhov's "A Doctor's Visit" and William Carlos Williams's "The Paid Nurse" to Dorothy Parker's "Lady with a Lamp," O. Henry's "Let Me Feel Your Pulse," and Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," the stories gathered here are peopled by a colorful and varied cast of doctors, nurses, and patients. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Human life is filled with predicaments. In these eight stories, Theodore Dalrymple examines how people struggle with everyday conflicts and frustrations - or create them for others. The challenges of modern life are revealed to be both tragic and amusing in these enthralling stories touching on the nature of contemporary society, its character and characters. Theodore Dalrymple is a retired doctor and psychiatrist who has written many books, including Life at the Bottom, Admirable Evasions and Around the World in the Cinemas of Paris.

In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures. Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind. Admirable Evasions also considers metaphysical objections to the assumptions of psychology, and suggests that literature is a far more illuminating window into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.

When Theodore Dalrymple wrote The Examined Life, poking fun at modern man's excessive concern for his own health, he little thought that Covid-19 would soon turn satire into reality. Are there considerations in life other, or more important, than health? The protagonist of this biting satire knew the answer even before Covid-19 struck. Theodore Dalrymple is a retired doctor and psychiatrist who has written many books, including Life at the Bottom, Admirable Evasions and Around the World in the Cinemas of Paris.

"Everywhere is interesting, especially if inhabited." Paris is the best city for seeing films from anywhere and everywhere in the world. You can travel around the globe in the cinemas of Paris. This is precisely what Theodore Dalrymple did. Here are his reflections - historical, cultural, philosophical - on the 33 films that he saw, often combined with his own reminiscences of the various countries he had visited himself. The universal and the particular are inextricably combined in this highly original and amusing book. Theodore Dalrymple is a retired doctor and psychiatrist who has written many books, including Life at the Bottom, Admirable Evasions and Embargo and Other Stories.

"The embargo was a success: the people were starving and the country was in ruins..." Extreme situations have always illuminated the human condition, and in these three stories set in three widely-separated places in times of crisis, Theodore Dalrymple explores the deeper levels of human nature. Theodore Dalrymple is a retired doctor and psychiatrist who has written many books, including Life at the Bottom, Romancing Opiates and Admirable Evasions.

Travelling to the hard-living Dylan Thomas's Boathouse in Laugharne, Wales, psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple considered along the way another foible - the folly of eminent people. Praised for their attainments in one area, high-achievers are more often than not prone to unexpected failings elsewhere. Enter a large cast of anti- and vivisectionists, surgeons, theologians, philosophers, admirals, judges, astrophysicists, Nazi-leaning homoeopaths, and writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, P. G. Wodehouse, and Conan Doyle. In his pithy and amusing style, Dalrymple casts a sobering light on an insuppressible trait of ours - the fallibility of the human mind.

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.

Part literary criticism, part philosophical exploration, this book holds many surprising gems of insight from two of the most interesting minds of our time.

In this, Theodore Dalrymple's second collection of short stories, he begins to let his imagination run. The absurdity of modern life is fully laid bare when taken to extremes. You will laugh through your tears. *** Satire is prophecy. -- Theodore Dalrymple

First paperback edition of the acclaimed Hardback.

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!