Make It a Purdy Holiday

Canadian Lisa Appignanesi's latest book, Sad, Mad and Bad: Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 (McArthur & Company), is on the longlist for the UK’s Samuel Johnson Prize. The prize is sponsored by BBC Four, and it "celebrates the diverse and thought-provoking writing in non-fiction." In Sad, Mad and Bad, Appignanesi examines the history of women and psychiatry over the past two hundred years, and she "unravels how symptoms and diagnoses in any given period have often played into each other; and more and more of our emotions and experience have become a matter for medics, therapists and drugs." The shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize will be announced on May 15.