Encyclopedia Neurotica

There is plenty of cynical humor here as Winokur debunks the self-help trends of our times: celebrity "sufferings"; Freud and his discredited theories; various disorders and anxieties; psychobabble; various addictions; guilt and hypochondrias; neurosii and manias; phobias and rages; delusions and victimhoods - No one or thing seems to be spared from Winokur's dissecting sarcasms. There are also biographical sketches of Howard Hughes, Alfred Hitchcock, Larry David (Seinfeld's writer), E.M. Cioran, and Woody Allen that are revealing and entertaining. This collection of quotations and commentaries is not as compelling as previous collections from Winokur - Zen To Go and The Portable Curmudgeon are his best books. Still, an overall entertaining read. Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

This book is great fun. I bought one for myself and have given it as a gift.

Jon Winokur has previously written or edited such books as 'The Portable Curmudgeon' and 'A Curmudgeon's Garden of Love' so it's no surprise that he came up with the encyclopedia arranged alphabetically with definitions and quotations on topics and eccentrics like Carrie Fisher: 'Instant gratification takes too long.' to adolescent: 'One who suffers from hormone-induced dementia' to political correctness: "intellectually challenged" (stupid) and "economically disadvantaged" (poor). This is a sort of Book of Hours with quotations that are guaranteed to have you laughing, or shaking your head in agreement, or thinking anew about too-generally accepted notions of our modern American society. It's all good humored - well, mostly - in the manner of 'Seinfeld.' (One of Winokur's heroes is Larry David, the writer of the first several seasons of that hit show.) He skewers the pretensions and group-think of our times with a light heart, but all with a barely suppressed growl. Irony and sarcasm abound, but also empathy (oh, he'd hate my using that word!) for those of us who are trying to make our way in this vale of tears. This is the sort of book that you want to keep at your bedside for dipping into for a few minutes now and again. I will admit, though, that I read it through from beginning to end and had some difficulty putting it down. Scott Morrison

Call me a geek, but I like reference books: almanacs, atlases, thesauri, dictionaries and, yes, encyclopedias. I am also a student of psychology (although one who is procrastinating with the final step towards becoming a psychologist, the dissertation, instead writing book reviews for a blog). What a delight, then, to stumble across Winokur's Encyclopedia Neurotica, a compendium of Winokur's own entries and notable quotables on historical psychological terms, the latest pop "psychobabble" (see pps. 184-186), and brief biographies of eccentric folks Between "the Absurd" and "zero-tolerance" (interesting bookends, to say the least), one can learn about traditional psychological terms, like the "id," and "conversion disorder," to new-fangled terms like "affluenza," or an illness characterized by a presence of or desire for wealth;" "cyberchondria," or the illness one gets from seeing one's symptoms on medical websites; and "mouse terror," the fearful belief that what scientists learn from mice in the lab, including susceptibility to disease, can be adequately translated to human beings. Winokur also presents brief biographies of a number of wonderfully eccentric people, like Howard Hughes (an obsessive compulsive personality) and Larry David (Hollywood writer and co-creator of Seinfeld). The inclusion of these biographical entries in the Encyclopedia fits in line with Winokur's premise that we are all wonderfully weird and should embrace our own unique character quirks and personality defects. The autbographical sketch by Richard Lewis in the preface is as appropriate as it is funny as at is concise. All in all, I thought the book was great and had a good balance of wit, humor, and sarcasm. Some brief entries could have been omitted. And maybe its my personality quirk, but the absence of sources for many of the entries was disappointing (Winokur asks us to take his word for their integrity, which I do, but its good to have the reference). Finally, these probably just got past the editors: in the index, "abuse abuse" (not a redundancy) comes before "Absurd, the," and "sexual addiction" is transformed into "sexual addition" (which I am sure many would prefer to addiction). Maybe hypervigilance is just another character quirk of mine. I would recommend it to all of my neurotic friends and colleagues.