Book Review: The Man Who Couldn’t Stop


The Man Who Couldn’t Stop

By David Adam

FSG

After years of battling the irrational terror of catching a disease every time he touched a door handle, drank from a water bottle, or scraped his knee playing soccer, Nature editor David Adam earned the right to be annoyed when people called themselves “a little bit OCD.” The greatest strength of his book—part memoir, part scientific treatise on obsessive-compulsive disorder—is that it meets those dilettantes on their level: “Imagine you can never turn it off.” Adam’s personal insights, and case studies from the famous (Winston Churchill, Nikola Tesla) to the obscure (an Ethiopian schoolgirl who ate a wall of mud bricks), make that feat of imagination both possible and painful.


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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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