Extremes: Reflections on Human Behavior

by Arend Jan Dunning, Johan Theron (Translator)

A Helen & Kurt Wolff Book
14 essays charting humanity from the saintly to the monstrous. Extremes convincingly shows, thru bizarre tales--all documented, all true--how unnatural human nature can be.
Extremes: A Mirror
Extremes of the Heart
The Burning Heart
Heart Transplants
The Neurotic Heart
Soldier's Heart
Extremes of Men & Knives
The Perfect Crime
The Anatomy Lesson
Eternal Youth
"Viva il Coltello"
Extremes of Faith
Parthenogenesis
Heretics
Anorexia Religiosa
Extremes of the Senses
A Taste for Cabin Boys
In the Land of the Blind
False Paradises
References

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Philosophy

221 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Arend Jan Dunning was a Dutch cardiologist.

Dunning was a member of the Health Council. As Vice President of the Dekker Commission he contributed to the restructuring the Dutch health care system.

Dr. Dunning was able to popularize scientific medical work and make it accessible for a wide audience.

Reviews

[Lucas]

Interesting little vignettes, some well known, others less so, about various extremes in human behaviour. The opening tale juxtaposes Joan D'Arc with Gilles de Rais, who were both united in service of French royalty before being executed as heratics, as the jacket puts it, "one as a martyr, one as a pederast mass murderer". Other tales focus on individual stories - for instance, Louis Braille's life is recounted under the aegis "extremities of senses". Mildly frustratingly, though we sense a little of where the author stands on these, they are primarily provocations, and there is only very limited reflection on what these tales are intended to mean.

[Corrine Brown]

Interesting theme not explored very well.

[Liv]

I enjoyed the prose (selfishly reminded me of how I wrote my college essays), but the author absolutely refused to engage with class at the level necessary to make any of this notations or criticisms exist off the page. He gets halfway somewhere but always lands on a rather lukewarm take that often feels mean and controversial for the sake of it. I bought this for the chapter on cannibalism and felt it under delivered severely (and was also suffering from general west Europe racism), I actually liked the chapters on anorexia and heart transplants the most.

[Jonathan]

This is a fun little book you can a couple of hours about people who lives their lives at the extremes of society, very often with medical or psychological reasons lying behind them. Examples: Joan of Arc, anorexics (he suggests that Saint Catherine of Aragon, as well as the majority of female saints were anorexic), and Verlaine. Written by a cardiologist.

[Ruth]

Before the museum, there was the Wunderkammer. This collection of oddities, exotics and curiosities, resembled the museum, in that it brought together artefacts from all over the world in one physical location. However, it lacked the thematic, edifying and classificatory intent of the museum.

Dunning's collection of essays seems to me to be a Cabinet of Curiosities, a Wunderkammer. Therefore, if you are hoping for an overarching theme or unifying rationale for this book, you are likely to be disappointed.

Even the title is wrong. 'Extremes: Reflections on Human Behaviour' doesn't seem to fit the collection (which covers topics such as the history of anatomical research, castrato singers, cannibalism, anorexia and religious fasting) and Dunning doesn't do a great deal of 'reflecting'. Dunning was a cardiologist, and this is reflected in his choice of topics, so if you're interested in the history of medicine, then you will probably enjoy it.

I originally read it because of my interest in Gilles de Rais. However, I found plenty of other things to interest me too. For example, I discovered that Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story featuring a character named Richard Parker, a cabin boy who is cannibalised on a life boat (the name Yann Martel consequently chose for the tiger in his novel, Life of Pi).

It's that sort of book - you're like to learn something that you didn't know before, but you may wonder if you really needed to know it.

[Erik Graff]

The cover and notes of this book attracted me when I saw it on the discount table at the Amarynth Bookstore in Evanston, Illinois, where I'd take my breaks from work. A series of essays by a doctor about famous persons' medical/psychiatric conditions, it makes for a good bedtime book.