Maternity Books

I am a registered midwife and this dictionary would be too basic even for a first year midwifery student, as the definitions have so little content as to be useless. Unfortunate but true! Hardly any appendices, and it says it is evidence based where possible but there is no evidence based information anywhere.

What I highly recommend instead is the latest, 2004? 2003? edition of Balliere's Dictionary for Midwives (Denise Tiran - editor)- in depth definitions that give accurate, very useful information and fantastic, useful appendices. This one is a wise investment and far more illustrated that the so-called Illustrated Dictionary of Midwifery which has hardly any illustrations compared to Balliere's and of poor quality.

I was extremely disappointed with this book. I see pictures of clothes and do not know where to find them or if I can even afford them. I see celebrities who had tons of help to look good but no real women.

I did receive a book that was a related topic, however I did not receive the book that I ordered. The invoice is correct with the title, but this is not the book I needed and ordered!

To my embarrassment, I required Jacobson's text on midlife women in my Psychology of Midlife seminar this semester because it was touted as a "feminist" look at women's midlife issues. Instead of learning from this book however, my students used it for target practice for their critical thinking skills, scientific thinking skills, and critiquing skills. This book reads like an undergraduate wrote it -- it is fraught with grammatical, typographical, logic, and even math errors, and the authors' hypotheses are not grounded in the literature. Many research questions are presented, but few of them are ever discussed in terms of Jacobson's findings. I jotted "corrections" on virtually every page of the book, and began class discussion on the text pointing out errors to the students so they would not be miseducated. Furthermore, Jacobson's articulated perspectives on feminism are ignorant and biased. I was truly sorry that I had my class read this book.

Once upon a time, when psychology and psychiatry were just beginning, there was a charlatan. He had a tiny practice and, where it has been possible to check his accounts of what went on in his sessions with the accounts of his patients, it's clear that in his case notes and his books he was a fantasist and a self-serving liar. He is not known ever to have cured a patient, though he claimed to do so almost invariably. He nearly killed some patients by advocating and in one dramatic case personally botching surgery to cure supposed mental illnesses. His name was Sigmund Freud. If he hung up his shingle today, he'd be struck off for malpractice so quick it'd make his ears spin.

In his chosen discipline of psychology he has no remnant of credibility and his ideas (that is, those ideas that were actually his; he did not, for example, invent or discover the "unconscious") have no influence. He is to most psychologists a mildly interesting figure from the history of the discipline, akin in interest and importance to, say, Francis Galton.

But in the 1980s something very odd happened. A number of mainly French writers who:
* adopted psychoanalytic - usually also Marxist - jargon;
* wrote it deliberately badly to disguise the fatuousness of their "thought";
* were briefly popular in France in the 1960s: -

suddenly became important in the US and UK. Not in their own fields, where no-one outside their cults took them seriously, but in, of all places, literary criticism.

So for a while academic publishers put out literary criticism like Gelpi's book on Shelley, in books that treated charlatans like Freud, Lacan, Kohut and so on as authorities who only need to be quoted in order to establish that something is true. This book is stuffed with the fantastic furniture of those dead cults, from the Mirror stage to the the Oedipus complex to the "narcissistic injury", and so on. Spectral things they are, these days, like rusting rides in an abandoned fun park.

So if you want a book analysing Shelley in an entirely arbitrary and tendentious way, using the concepts of mainly French versions of psychoanalysis, then this is as good a book as any other of its kind.

Its kind includes similar books by a number of writers who cited each other and wrote blurbs for each other's books. Each wrote excruciatingly bad books about Shelley in the 1980s and 1990s, from within what appears to have been an academic mutual support system. I know none of them, and have nothing against them except their bad books, but I shan't name and shame. Pick up any one of the books, and you'll find the others getting boosted, if you're interested. But I can't see many people outside the circle bothering to cite much of this stuff, though.

If you want a book on what Shelley actually wote, how he wrote, and what his writings actually say, this book is useless. Now lit crit has moved on to fresh fields, and the people who made their careers writing Deleuzian vapour now discreetly omit those names and their associated jargon from their more recent publications. Lacan and the merry crew used to be name-dropped; now they're just dropped.

The best recent book on Shelley as a writer, as opposed to a subject for long-distance, chronologically-challenged telepathic psychoanalysis, is probably William Keach's "Shelley's style". It's illuminating on what Shelley wrote, how he wrote it, what it means, and what's distinctive about Shelley as a writer. Recommended.

Summary: in the 1980s and 1990s there was an intellectual train wreck. Round the decay of that colossal wreck there are strewn books like Gelpi's: badly written, incoherent, and written from an intellectual framework that simply has nothing to do with literature or, though it has political pretensions, Planet Earth and its politics. Useful in gardening, I suppose, or as landfill.