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Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder Jackie Orr, Durham, NC: Duke Universitty Press, 2006.
This book is divided into five relatively long chapters. The first deals with "History, Memory, Story." These components are not comprised so much of topics for investigation as the methods that are drawn upon in the author's presentation. The author frequently shifts from one mode of analysis to another without giving the reader appropriate warning. As a result, the book contains interesting fragments but is lacking in coherence. Perhaps the author intended such outcomes because the style of writing reflects the disjointed and incoherent nature of panic itself.
The manuscript is a selective chronicle of the study of panic responses and the many techniques that have emerged for dealing with them in the social sciences, psychiatry, cultural studies, the mass media, the drug industry, and the military. The episodes range historically from the Iroquois Theater fire in the early 190Os up to the present time. Attention is directed toward the "war neurosis" of World War II, the post-traumatic stress syndrome...