Deborah Blum

We take it for granted today that babies need love. But less than a century ago, psychologists warned women against showing their children "too much affection"-predicting dire consequences ranging from deadly disease to sexual dysfunction in adulthood. The story of how this conventional wisdom was finally shattered takes us into the life and the laboratory of Harry Harlow-workaholic, alcoholic, brilliant and brave, capable of caustic wit and cruelty-and...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning author tells the amazing story of William James' quest for empirical evidence of the spirit world. What if a world-renowned professor of psychology at Harvard University, acclaimed as one of the leading intellects of the time, suddenly announced that he believed in ghosts? At the close of the nineteenth century, Dr. William James, a founder of the American Psychological Association, did just that. James joined with two other...

In 1968, Prosenjit Poddar, 23, made the remarkable transition from Indian untouchable to graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Completely ignorant of American dating customs, he met Tanya Tarasoff, 19, a junior college student, at a folk dance. What for Tanya was only a casual, sometimes ego-boosting, sometimes annoying, friendship, became for Prosenjit an all-consuming, mad obsession. Despite psychiatric counseling for Prosenjit,...