The Bookshelf: April 25, 2017

Trib+Health is joining with respected books authority Kirkus Reviews to bring you select reviews of books of note in the field of health care. For more book reviews and recommendations, visit Kirkus.com. 

STRANGE CONTAGION: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves

by Lee Daniel Kravetz

Yawning can be contagious. Suicide, too, as this intriguing book shows. ... As journalist and psychologist Kravetz writes, once bulimia was separated from anorexia and described in the psychological literature, the incidence of the disease grew and even spread to places where it had been unknown. ... Now, it seems, psychologists are seeking a common language for epidemic suicide, the larger subject of Kravetz’s look at how harmful memes spread and to which he was introduced when, soon after moving to Silicon Valley, he was on hand to record instances of children killing or harming themselves in patterns that suggest social contagion in all its varieties ... A worthy, only occasionally clunky treatise on matters of urgent concern.

For the full review, visit kirkus.com.