Books
Stewart Justman’s books are available at Amazon.com. Visit Stewart’s Amazon.com author page for more information.
Seeds of Mortality: The Public and Private Worlds of Cancer
Ivan R. Dee, 2003. Recipient of the 2004 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay.
“One does not let go of this book easily”–the PEN judges. Reviewed in New England Journal of Medicine, Oct. 30, 2003.
The Nocebo Effect: Overdiagnosis and Its Costs
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
As normal conditions are branded as medical issues, they acquire powerful, suggestive labels that readily come to life in our minds and bodies.
Fool's Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology
Ivan R. Dee, 2005. Recipient of the Popular Culture Association’s Ray and Pat Browne Award for the best book of 2005 by a single author.
Martin Luther King proclaims that the time has come for freedom, Phil McGraw that the time has come for wellbeing.
To Feel What Others Feel: Social Sources of the Placebo Effect
University of California Medical Humanities Press, 2012.
A humanist looks at the placebo effect, taking into account both its history and its ambiguity, and bringing out the more questionable potential of some health fashions, trends and movements of our time. (Available for free download)
Literature and Human Equality
Northwestern University Press, 2006.
The elevation of commoners into positions of importance not only changed the appearance of literature but made possible new ways of constructing a tale.
Do No Harm: How a Magic Bullet for Prostate Cancer Became a Medical Quandary
Ivan R. Dee, 2008.
The finasteride controversy is important not only in itself and as an omen of the future conundrums of chemoprevention but as an instance and marker of the trend toward population-based medicine. Reviewed in New England Journal of Medicine, June 5, 2008. [Note: On Dec. 1, 2010 the FDA’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee recommended against the use of finasteride and dutasteride for chemoprevention. This book was cited in the course of discussion.]
The Springs of Liberty: The Satiric Tradition and Freedom of Speech
Northwestern University Press, 1999.
If the novel is unbound by the presuppositions of other genres (thus constituting a sort of supergenre), the freedom of satire is such that it overflows every generic boundary and its power such that it animates different genres in the first place.
Shakespeare: The Drama of Generations
Delhi: Macmillan, 2007.
The flash of brilliance, the leap out of the ordinary, the break with existing practice, the violation of norms, the sudden discontinuity–all exert a powerful attraction. They possess drama. This study of a war against the young in the greatest of all dramatists turns the tables, bringing out the importance of generational succession and the continuous renewal of the world in Shakespeare’s plays from one end to the other.
The Hidden Text of Mill's Liberty
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1990.
Mill and the republican ideal of strenuous virtue.
The Psychological Mystique (Rethinking Theory)
Northwestern University Press, 1998.
The Psychological Mystique weighs the extraordinary influence of psychology on culture, traces the therapeutic model to its roots, and examines the connection between psychology and the marketing of goods and ideas.
The Apple of Discord: Ten Tortured Marriages
New Delhi: Viva, 2009.
Looks into ten of the most difficult marriages on record—some fictional, some not—culminating in Gandhi’s union with the woman who taught him the practice of non-violent resistance.