A New Book

There is a new book being release tomorrow, August 4, 2011. It really seems like a good book to read. It is called “A First Rate Madness: Uncovering the links between leadership and mental illness. The book is about famous leaders who had some mental illness. It is written by Nassir Ghaemi. This is a quote from the book “The best crisis leaders are either mentally ill or mentally abnormal; the worst crisis leaders are mentally healthy.” He talks about both effective leaders who had mental illness, and ineffective leaders such as George W. Bush and George McClellan, the civil war general who “evolved in the opposite directions from precocious sensation to a plain dud.” The author talks about eight men whose stories he tells about. He believes a pattern that was ignored by historians, and the public, is the fact that they did shape the second half of the twentieth century. Some of the others he examines in the book are Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, and Franklin Roosevelt. One of the quotes about the book is “Take realism, for instance: study after study has shown that those suffering depression are better than “normal” people at assessing current threats and predicting future outcomes.” He asks the question would we have voted in Lincoln or Churchill, knowing that they had depression? I do not think so! It seems from the previews to be a very interesting book. There are things in it that I did not know. For example: Adolf Hitler was bipolar and did intravenous amphetamine. “Legally, he knew what he was doing, and he intended to do it; thus he was fully responsible for all his actions.” Whether or not you believe in his thesis, the book will be a good read.