Description: Reflections on how Americans are constrained by cultural scripts for age-, race-, and gender-proper emotional behavior and how our increasingly media-saturated culture impoverishes our interior lives.
Review Quotes: "Feelings have political consequences. Statistical Panic offers complexly layered readings of writers whose works have exposed the intimate connections between private sorrows and contemporary social realities, memoir and public policy, autobiography and theory: Joan Didion's portrait of grief, Freud's and Woolf's anatomies of anger, Paul Monette's affecting narrative of lives lost to AIDS, Morrison's searing exposure of racial injustice. Kathleen Woodward has created a compassionate criticism for our post-September 11 world."--Nancy K. Miller, author of But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives