The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World's Strangest Syndromes

by Frank Bures

Why do some men become convinced—despite what doctors tell them—that their penises have, simply, disappeared. Why do people across the world become convinced that they are cursed to die on a particular date—and then do? Why do people in Malaysia suddenly “run amok”?

In The Geography of Madness , acclaimed magazine writer Frank Bures investigates these and other “culture-bound” syndromes, tracing each seemingly baffling phenomenon to its source. It’s a fascinating, and at times rollicking, adventure that takes the reader around the world and deep into the oddities of the human psyche. What Bures uncovers along the way is a poignant and stirring story of the persistence of belief, fear, and hope.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, Psychology, Science, History, Geography, Medicine

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 2016

About the author

Frank Bures is the author of "The Geography of Madness." He frequently writes for magazines and his work has been included in the Best American Travel Writing, and selected as “Notable” in the Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing. He lives with his family in Minneapolis.

Reviews

[Petra X]

Update This book is all over the place. It's the memoir of the author and his journey to become a journalist and author, it's a philosophical and scientific discussion on consciousness and how life can be improved if you only write about it (!) which is proven by at least one study (!), it's about traditional v western medicine and about penis thieves.

I'm on chapter 12 of 14, so far there have been retracted penises, but no actual penis thieves, voodoo deaths but the 'search for the meaning of the world's strangest syndromes' is the most interesting part. Except he doesn't mean it.

What he means is the strangest syndromes in his eyes. And he makes the point that what is a syndrome in one place, say anorexia, doesn't even exist in another, and that if you go to a doctor in the US and one in France with the same symptoms, in France they are likely to say it is a crisis of the liver and give you suppositories to stuff up your bum, which would change the whole nature of drug advertising on tv should this become the most popular way of administering medication as it is in France.

If the author had written a book on biocultural diseases and disorders, how caused, who experiences them, if they are exportable etc and treatment in various locations, that would have been a 10 star book and fabulously interesting. This really has me thinking. I shall write more about it (I've been taking notes) in the final review. If I get round to one...
__________

"The first recorded incident of penis theft in Africa I could find took place in Sudan in the 1960s. But in the mid- to late seventies in Nigeria, there were waves of well-documented cases. One of these happened in the northern city of Kaduna, where a psychiatrist named Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu was working in his office when a policeman arrived, escorting two men. One of them said he needed a medical assessment: He had accused the other of making his penis disappear.

As with Wasiu Karimu and the crowd outside the bus, this had caused a disturbance in the street. During Ilechukwu’s examination, he later recounted, the victim stared straight ahead while the doctor examined his penis and pronounced him normal.

“Exclaiming,” Ilechukwu wrote in the Transcultural Psychiatric Review, “the patient looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared.”

This sounds funny but there were riots and deaths over disappearing genitals. The fact that a modern education and knowledge of the world through the internet etc does not mean that people don't believe in such as disappearing genitals (happens to women too). This is probably closer to home for me than for most of you, since the Caribbean is rife with Obeah.

Obeah is not a religion, as voodoo, shango or Santeria, which are as valid as the religions that run alongside them - Christianity, Hinduism etc. It is a system of magic for which payment to the Obeahman (or woman) rather than rituals are what is required. More when I write a review, with examples.

[Book Riot Community]

The title alone sold me on this book, but the insides are pretty great, too! Bures investigates "culture-bound" syndromes, which are cultural myths and superstitions leading people to believe things that other cultures might consider strange. This is a weird, fascinating look at some of those syndromes around the world.


Tune in to our weekly podcast dedicated to all things new books, All The Books: http://bookriot.com/category/all-the-...

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a disappointing book. The title and cover summaries were very promising, and I was looking forward to an interesting investigation of culturally determined forms of (mental) illness. Instead, this book is an uneven mix of personal memoir, travelogue, and not particularly original ruminations about the mind-body connection.

Some authors have a knack of making their own lives sound fascinating. This was not the case here. I just couldn't work up any interest in the author's year in Italy, his love of travel, his struggles as a young writer. It all sounded vaguely dysfunctional and sad, but it couldn't hold my interest.

As a travelogue, the book was only very moderately successful. Although the author has traveled to some truly unusual places, the descriptions never brought Nigeria or China truly to life. The author seems to be very interested in sharing details of the check-in procedure in the various hostels he lodges in, and sometimes describes some of the unusual travelers he meets- but it felt flat. Most of his travel stories consist of going to see doctors (either of traditional or Western medicine) to ask them about recent epidemics of koro , a mental condition where the victim has the feeling that his penis will retract into his lower abdomen, after which he will die. Some of the doctors remember the epidemics, or have heard of the disease, or may have seen patients with this complaint. Most of them, however, have not heard of koro or its local names and variants. But the author won't give up and asks question after question. Some of these sections read like they had been transcribed from a recording : we plod on through pages and pages of banal questions about how older patients prefer traditional medicine and younger patients have more faith in Western medicine and related issues.

In contrast to what the title had led me to believe, the book did not really study culturally defined diseases in detail. The author seemed mainly interested in penises, either as in the case of patients feeling that their organ had been stolen (as in Nigeria), or as koro , the fear of death after retraction of the penis into the belly. There were rather superficial discussions of voodoo death (wherein people are told by sorcerers or shamans that they are going to die, and then they die), of fugue states, of unexplained noctural deaths among the Hmong people, but it all felt perfunctory compared to the globe-spanning chase for penis-related maladies.

As a result of his travels, interviews and reading, the author comes to the conclusion - surprise, surprise- that the mind-body connection is stronger than we think. Yes, there is such a thing as the placebo effect. Yes, even in Western cultures there are physical conditions that are driven by the mind. Talking about your feelings can help you feel better -what a novel idea! I read the author's ruminations about the mind-body connection with a sense of impatience, hoping that some new insight would be revealed. But I didn't find anything novel here and closed the book with a slight sense of having been cheated.

Bottom line : the writing is too flat and the research too narrowly focused to make this book come alive.

[Eustacia Tan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you're having a great start to 2017! My first book for this year is one that I totally misjudged but still turned out to be amazing. From the cover and title, I thought that this was going to about different strange illnesses around the world, but it turned out to be about culture in general.

The author's journey started when he went on a year-long exchange to Italy and came back, experiencing what most of us will realise is culture shock. For the author, this culture shock, this realisation that other people have different ideas of what is cool and normal set him on a long quest to understand koro (or suo yang in Chinese), the disease that makes men believe that their penises are retracting into their bodies and that this will cause them to die. To try and understand this, he travels all around the world, from Nigeria to Singapore to China.

By the way, Singapore was a destination because we had a koro epidemic in 1967, where 469 men reported their penises were shrinking (these are reported cases, so the actual number may actually be higher).

And through this journey, the book starts to give us a sense of how culture, the stories we tell ourselves and each other, can affect our body and mind. As the book puts it:
Which is exactly how stories work: First, they make things possible. Then they make them familiar. Then they make them real.
Despite this book not being what I thought it was, I really enjoyed it. It articulated the feeling of living overseas, and of coming back and realising that no matter how hard you try, things have changed. Home has moved in a slightly different direction from you. And when I go back, I will have to decide how many of the habits I pick up in Japan I will keep, what I will modify, and what I will have to leave behind.

I would definitely recommend this book to others, especially to those who have lived overseas for a period of time. It is a surprisingly thoughtful book that has an original take on a feeling that is often very hard to put in words.

This review was first posted at Inside the mind of a Bibliophile

[Петър Стойков · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kнигата е доста зле написан пътепис, но идеята й е брилянтна. Авторът изследва различните "мании" по света, които срещат критериите за психични заболявания... само че не се срещат никъде другаде, дето хората не знаят за тях и/или не са модерни.

Примерно вещиците, които "крадат пенисите" на мъже в Африка сега (и на много други места в света през световната история). Мъжете гледат в гащите си и са УБЕДЕНИ, че пенисът им го няма - до степен да дават пари и да стигат до насилие за да убедят нарочените за вещици да им го върнат.

От там пътят до други, по-познати за нас заболявания не е дълъг. Примерно анорексията е реално заболяване, но в държавите, в които е непозната тя практически не съществува. Случаите на анорексия са в правопропорционална зависимост от това колко се говори за нея по медиите.

Връзката ум-тяло се изследва отдавна в науката, като плацебо-ефекта е определено най-изследваната част от нея. Психосоматичните заболявания обаче - не чак толкова. А би трябвало, защото част от психичните, а също и някои физически заболявания изпълняват критериите да бъдат определени като психосоматични.

Примери за това са "дългия ковид" в момента, както и предменструалния синдром, тъй модерен в близкото минало. Това са "болести" със съвсем мъгляви, общи симптоми, базирани главно на това как се чувства човек. От тях, колко учудващо, статистиката сочи, че страдат повече хора с диагностицирано тревожностно разтройство, а корелацията между степента на тревожност на човек и вероятността да има някое от тия заболявания е права.

Авторът говори в този смисъл също за синдрома на турет, диагностицирането на аутизъм и ADHD (не за самите заболявания, а за "патологията" на прекаленото им диагностициране) и др.

Изводите, които може да си направи човек са доста интересни, като се вземе предвид, че живеем (и все повече ще живеем) в епоха на социални медии, където "свързаността" с другите хора по целия свят е на небивало ниво. Където медии и инфлуенсъри се хвърлят като лешояди върху всичко по-странно и го усилват до дупка в стремежа си към кликове и гледаемост... Можем да видим началото на какво прави това с по-податливите на внушения и тревожност хора, а как ще продължи всичко това не ми се мисли.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frank Bures has been a widely respected journalist for years. In the geeky world of journalists and nonfiction writers, he is particularly admired for his wide-ranging journalistic interests and his skill as an interviewer and reporter. It is my privilege to be among his colleagues and friends, and have watched the evolution of this book for a couple of years now. (Although, like all good passions, this book has been years in the making). As a narrator, Bures is sensitive, insightful, and unwilling to make broad assumptions and assertions. The narrative frame here is a personal journey--trying to understand so-called "culture-bound syndromes" while also understanding his own obsession with the very idea of these syndromes. At its heart, this book explores the very idea of what constitutes illness--both mental and physical--and forces the reader to confront his or her own preconceived notions. For anyone who has experienced culture shock, and whose life has been changed by that collision, Bures' experience will feel familiar. But he takes it farther by trying to get to the heart of the elements of the cultures he's explored which have shocked him. And, in fact, he may even force you to consider the idea that culture itself doesn't exist. At least not how it's been defined.

Unrelated to the book, I do have to say this: several other readers here have had the audacity to "review" the book and put it on their "read" shelf despite reading only a single chapter. Sorry, but you do no get to put a book on your "read" shelf if you only read the first chapter. The act of passing judgment publicly on a book that you have not read is dishonest, unethical, and frankly appalling. I happen to know how much work it takes to report on and write a book because I am also a writer--and the thought that someone would feel qualified to analyze and publicly review a book based on a handful of pages sickens me. If I'd stopped reading East of Eden after ten pages, I would've assumed the book was plodding and boring. And I consider it a masterpiece.

If you don't like a book, you have every right to let fellow readers know that. But if you're negatively "reviewing" a book you haven't read, then you are dishonest. This deception is widespread on Goodreads, and I wish there were some way to crack down on it. That kind of thing is not the act of a true reader.

[Rosalia Tenorio-Martínez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me hizo reflexionar mucho acerca de los trastornos mentales, sobre todo en relación a qué tal vez más de la mitad de los incluidos en el DSM, sean trastornos ligados a la cultura gringa y los tomamos como universales y con una base principalmente Neuro fisiológica.

[Billie · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I began reading, I thought to myself that this was feeling a bit like a Jon Ronson book, and that was delightful. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, things fell apart a bit for me. I was hoping for more variety in the syndromes explored, but Bures stayed unfortunately penis-focused. Had the title been other than what it is, I would not have expected variety. I rather wish the author had admitted to himself that the only one of the "World's Strangest Syndromes" he had any interest in was vanishing penises and kept to it. The occasional dip into exploring other syndromes seemed more of a distraction than a support of the author's theme.

(Also, there were several grammatical/spelling errors which I found distracting. I'm going to put those down to this being an uncorrected proof and hope they're fixed by the time the book is published.)

[Carolyn Walsh · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an interesting subject, but I found it rambling and repetitive in parts.

It is based on the theory that cultural beliefs interact with mind and body to create physical conditions unique to the place , time and present beliefs in the area. A bioloop where mental and physical states are connected to alter each other, and produce syndromes known in that culture. Real pain or other physical symptoms are the result.

Most of the book recounts the author's travels in Asia interviewing medical doctors, psychiatrists, traditional healers and witch doctors to understand why, mainly in the 1960s and 1980s, physically normal boys and men were in a panic believing their penises were being stolen. Depending on the help available somewhere considered mad, others were given tranquilizers and told this was folklore, others were treated by traditional herbs and other things. Most of the book only briefly mentions other unusual cultural syndromes, although he documents cases of voodoo death where the patient had a strong belief that he or she was cursed to die at a certain date and did.

He compares what happens during the emotional religious experience of glossolalia, where the heightened state of the brain produces symptoms if the person knows of and believes in the experience.

It seems that when the prevalent cultural stories are no longer believed the illnesses disappear. Mentioned as conditions which no longer exist are Fugue, where men in the 1800s in Europe wandered away from home, often finding themselves many miles from home with no idea how they got there. Amok, restricted to Malaysia, resulting in sudden rages no longer seems to exist. There was also the deaths of Vietnamese men who moved to the States dying in their sleep.

The author repeats his theories often which intrudes on the narrative. There is also the question as to whether some syndromes are unique to the Western world and follow the same pattern. Arguably some listed and being found nowhere else include anorexia, PMS, repressed memory and animal hoarding.

2.5 stars

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a gorgeously written and nuanced exploration of the intersection between health and culture, wellness and storytelling, and the impact of perception and psychology on illness. How we feel and how we experience our own bodies - regardless of where we are in the world - depends heavily on the stories we tell ourselves. Every syndrome is narrative and every narrative is cultural. Bures winds a compelling tale of cultural exploration and the deep questioning of the explorer. The result here is a beautiful meditation on what it means to be sick and what it means to be hurting and what it means to be well. Highly recommended.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh. It wasn't what I was looking for - needs more science. But the concept is very interesting, how our cultural beliefs play upon the mind and body to create syndromic diseases with physical symptoms that are unique to time and place, even if the follow-through in the book isn't great.

Could have done without constant comment on whether the brown and/or non-US people he communicated with spoke quality English. *eyeroll*

[Mr Shahabi · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an entertaining book, good for tea time discussion, but I can't help to feel that this was more of a biography than a search

A nice read never the less




Ps: if you got out of a cold shower, please don't panic and grab on your penis and run like hell to a hospital, it will come back soon, no worries

[Andrew McMillen · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the centre of this book is a small question: why do some people suddenly start believing their genitals have been stolen? Wrapped in this strange query is a much larger one, which American journalist Frank Bures has spent many years puzzling over: why do some cultures hold such strange beliefs, while others do not?

These questions take Bures from his home town in Minnesota to Nigeria, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Thailand and Borneo. At its heart, 'The Geography of Madness' is an incisive investigative yarn that interrogates what makes us human, and how the stories we tell each other can sometimes make us sick.

Bures explores the subject of koro — the overpowering belief that one’s genitals are retracting and will disappear — with genuine curiosity and earnestness. In this approach there’s a touch of Fox Mulder from TV’s The X-Files: Bures wants to believe, or at least understand, the cultural loops in which his fellow humans travel.

There is no scoffing to be found here, and this tone suits the book well: a lesser writer, and a less mature man, might have simply written koro off as an affliction confined to primitive nations that have yet to adopt the Western medicine model wherein, as Bures writes:

"We see our circulatory system as plumbing. We see the brain as a computer. We see our heart as a pump. We think of the body as a car — a metaphor that dates back to the 1920s, when cars first entered our lives. Likewise, we see the doctor as a mechanic, and illness as the result of a part breaking, which it’s the doctor’s job to repair. If something can’t be explained in mechanical terms, we tend not to believe it’s real. And yet, things are often more complicated than that."

As you read the above paragraph, you may find yourself nodding along to the sentiment. Why, yes, of course that is how the human body works: when something fails, we visit the mechanic for a tune-up in the form of conversation, diagnosis, prescription, expert instruction and treatment, perhaps in the form of sharp implements penetrating our bodily tissues to remove some disease. Consider, then, how strange this doctor-patient transaction would appear to a person raised in a different culture, where treatment often takes the form of carefully blended herbal medicine, rather than synthesised drugs or invasive surgery. They might think we’re crazy, just as we might think the same of them.

This difference of opinion cuts to the questions Bures has been turning over in his mind for his entire adult life, since he visited Italy as a bewildered exchange student in his late teens; now, at 44, he has published 'The Geography of Madness'.

In a sense, he knows he is grappling with smoke by attempting to pin to the mat the precise nature of cultural differences. As he notes, ‘‘culture’’ is one of the most difficult words to define — in any language — and so his task here is enormous. The journey, though, is a wondrous and eye-opening one, and the author captures his experiences with a spare style that immediately endears him to the reader.

“Much of what you’ll encounter in the pages that follow will seem impossible, or at least hard to believe,” he writes in the introduction. “As you read on, and as we travel together, I hope they will become more real to you as well, and that the lines between the real and the imagined, between the familiar and the foreign, begin to blur.”

Running parallel to this narrative of the author’s enduring curiosity about “how our ideas can kill us, how our beliefs can save us, and how these things quietly determine the course of our lives” is that of a young freelance writer slowly finding his way as a professional in an industry that requires unnatural reserves of optimism, persistence and self-belief.

Bures is not shy about documenting his early stumbles. “One of the reasons for my many failures as a young writer was that I thought that stories were just interesting things that happened,” he notes. He thought he could simply write about these interesting things and people would read what he wrote. It didn’t quite work that way: the problem was that Bures himself didn’t know, at that point, what his stories meant or why they mattered: “I had no idea what the causal links were, either within the story itself or to the larger world.”

Viewed in this light, 'The Geography of Madness' is a resounding success, for it offers clear proof that the writer has learned from his early failings. After many years of thinking, reporting and documenting, he knows what this story means and why it matters.

It is written with the deft touch of one who has written many thousands of words before these, and structured with the skill of one who is now a master of telling stories in text. What Bures has achieved here is a complex, nuanced and original meditation on our species and how we manage to coexist on a planet where we are all the same, yet each so different.

Review originally published in The Weekend Australian, May 28 2016: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/...

[Bookthreat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read our review at https://bookthreat.com/2017/06/06/hou...

[Penny Cipolone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting theories about physical and emotional illnesses being linked to individual cultures. Not very well written but did make some original points.

[Timothy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll admit two words in the title grabbed my attention when I saw this book at the library. I'll assume I'm not the only one. The contents are spotted with some very interesting tales of cultural syndromes and theories on what cultures actually are and how they evolve and possibly why such things as "magical penis theft" occur in some parts of the world and not others. However what feels like the majority of the book is the author travelling to far flung locales to interview health care professionals who have little or no actual information about the phenomena of "disappearing penis" epidemics or any of the other syndromes he investigated. It would have been a great book to write, travelling I'm guessing on the publisher's dime, but I found it fairly unrewarding to actually read. It's a short book though and fairly breezy to read so it wasn't a total chore to get through although it felt like it didn't end it just stopped. The footnotes were the most fascinating parts, but I find it annoying flipping back and forward all the time and wished the writer could have just woven the facts into the main story. Whilst I didn't hate the book, I'm quite surprised at the amount of 4 and 5 star reviews.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a highly readable and incredibly fascinating look at culture-bound health conditions.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the title and subtitle suggest, this is mostly an examination of odd mental illnesses that occur only in certain settings -- "culture-bound disorders" as the DSMV would put it. The author impulsively set off on a trip through three continents to learn more about "koro," a strange fear that one's penis is shrinking, retracting inside the abdomen, or even stolen by a witch. It seems like a perfect example of an imaginary illness that can only strike people with rather limited sophistication, right? But as the author slowly learns more and more about this and some other complaints that are marginalized and dismissed as superstition, he also learns that many illnesses codified in the DSMV are culturally bound too, only they are limited to the Western countries, or even just the US, where the DSMV was codified. Comedians might comment that bulima does not occur in countries where food is scarce; the author wonders whether all mental illness might not be culturally-determined. This is sure to cause some offense, since we are inclined to think that real illnesses have clear biological bases. But the author also points out the singular failure of psychiatry to find purely biological bases for any given illness. This doesn't meant they are unreal, or supernatural, or "all in our heads". What if all mental illnesses have cultural as well as biological bases? He is unable to come to any firm conclusions, and is admittedly a journalist, not a scientist. But the idea that how mental illness manifests is tied to one's culture is very compelling and makes a lot of sense. Among the stunning bits of evidence he points to are the widely varying rates of depression in different countries, the similarity of schizophrenia in "advanced" countries and shamanism in more tribal societies, and the shocking absence of PMS in many cultures. Clearly there is more to the mind than pure biology, and The geography of madness is a fascinating effort to find the cultural component, which is perhaps most clearly indicated in cases of minds that are not functioning normally.

[Tammie]

Funny...interesting and well written. I highly recommend it!

[Natverse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I changed my mind about what to rate this book because the longer I thought about it the more I realized he did right by the story he was really telling through the "penis thieves" stories. It seems like he is fixated on this one story and simply mentions briefly other cultural phenomena, but what we really see is how a single syndrome or madness differs across different cultures. It was enough to fill a whole book, the various stories and mentions and investigations of the penis-shrinking or disappearing disorder. If the author had begun to investigate a different issue other than koro, I have no doubt he would have found another book worth of material. The strangest syndrome or disorder could exist in so many different ways with so many different cures that it feels like you're playing cultural telephone depending on even the region of a country.

It speaks to something else I have felt deeply while growing up—cultures are always seen as this vast thing belonging to a country or a "race" of people, when in actuality, it is something that changes from community to community or even from family to family. Culture is not easily defined by size or how strange it really is to the western world.

Culture means something different to everyone. I embrace the culture my family surrounded me with, but I also embrace the culture I grew up in Canada. To family members I am too culturally Canadian or "westernized", but to friends in Canada I am different in good and "bad" ways. It affects yours mannerisms and how you perceive people. Culture is a very complicated part of the psyche and it is no wonder that madness across borders differs (but also within those borders).

[Jaime · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the promising title, this book landed solidly in the "ok" column for me.

I was really expecting descriptions/experiences of many different syndromes, but despite mentioning a number of cultural syndromes, both Eastern and Western, the book focuses primarily on one. The focus is koro, or suo yang, which is a syndrome where the patient thinks their genitals are disappearing, or even being stolen. A compelling topic, sure! But what ends up happening is that the author travels around various areas in southeast Asia, asking the same questions of various doctors and psychiatrists and getting the same answers, over and over again.

Behind all that there is some interesting content about cultural and/or psychosomatic illnesses in general, including some conditions that I wouldn't have thought of being in that category and the beginnings of people making reference to "culture" in history. But it seemed like as soon as he started getting into something interesting, we're back again with the author, asking yet another doctor if they have heard of/remember suo yang and if they ever see it now, and getting essentially the same answer as the last person he interviewed.

So not terrible, but it doesn't live up to the promise of the title.

[Mary Gunderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book! The title seems misleading to me, though Frank Bures does spend plenty of time on penises. But really it's a book about the search for meaning in a culture. How do the people in a culture acquire beliefs that don't exist elsewhere. Bures is a fascinating travel companion to Nigeria, Hong Kong, China and America. He takes off the lid in each place and gives us a chance to peer inside places tourists rarely visit and get acquainted with how people live and what they believe about medicine, health and well being. Bures examines his own beliefs and observes how his kids are developing their own set of beliefs.

I didn't read it straight through, buy savored as I went along. I'm going to read it again. Bures is an thoughtful, intelligent observer and a fine writer. Full disclosure: I know him slightly through a freelance writers' group in Minneapolis. An attorney I know who works internationally read it in one 24-hour period. Today I heard her strongly recommending it to a pediatric enterology physician. I highly recommend it to you!

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject matter of this book could not have been more fascinating to me, but the author would barely scratch the surface of the topic before moving on to something else. It's really frustrating. Fortunately, it's sourced well, so I can dig up all this cool stuff elsewhere.

In typical male fashion, the writer is most obsessed throughout the text with koro, a culture-bound syndrome mostly found in parts of Africa, China, Singapore, and Japan, in which men believe that their penis is shrinking, being sucked inside them, or else "magicked" away, and that once it disappears, they will die.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject of this book is fascinating -- the way culture, maladies, the brain and the body are all intertwined. That one culture can have a syndrome of some sort that another culture has never heard of -- yet the syndrome's sufferers truly feel the pain or effects. It makes you question what's real.

The author interjects himself a bit much (it's really hard to convince anyone how much study abroad changed you -- it just is), and I agree with a friend that he focused on disappearing penises WAY too much. I wish there had been a broader overview of the different types of syndromes, and being a U.S.-centric jerk, I would have liked to have read more about the maladies that might affect us that could be culture-bound.

[Pamela Klinger-horn · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there is an award for BEST TITLE OF THE YEAR, "The Geography of Madness - Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for Meaning of the World's Strangest Syndromes" should win! Travel writer Frank Bures takes an absolutely fascinating look at cultural "diseases." This bizarre phenomenon is not simply a product of an uneducated or backward civilization. Bures also shines a light on illness that is peculiar to the western world and how different countries give similar symptoms widely disparate treatments. Well researched and rivetingly told, THE GEOGRAPHY OF MADNESS is my favorite non-fiction of 2016.

[Kevin Revolinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read. It starts with the amusing syndrome (to anyone not actually suffering from it anyway) broadens to greater observations of culturally related afflictions and ends in the importance of stories to ourselves as people and collectively as a society. Interesting references to medical studies and anecdotes that should make you think, if not totally overturn one's typical understanding of mind over matter, Western medicine, and the limits of Western psychology. I liked the personal travel and memoir elements tied into the subject matter as well.

[Ron S · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at culture bound syndromes, including penis theft and running amok. While this book does seem at times like an over-inflated magazine article, Bures includes a lot of information on different cultural beliefs, like those found in the western world and thought to be firmly grounded on fact (e.g. PMS and carpal tunnel syndrome) mostly absent in other parts of the world. Prejudices found in the DSM, the power of both the placebo and nocebo effects along with the story of the author's own coming of age as a writer also make up this book that includes travel to Nigeria and China.

[Mysteryfan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is meant to be eyecatching. The introductory chapters on the topic of penis theft left me a little cold. But I enjoyed the book more as I read it. He makes some excellent points about the stories we tell ourselves and how believing those stories influences our behavior. The examples are mostly drawn from africa and Southeast Asia, which was interesting. Not going to be everyone's cup of tea but I found it ultimately satisfying.

[Roz Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oops. No penis in my present. But book interested moi as I just watched "M Butterfly" several times (saw Bway piece). Stdied "trans" of various kinds. My fave died last year. I am 80 this year and always believed in the Power of Believing. Reviews of this book have no mention of the Lourdes and religious effects being included in any way. No Tony Robbins? No Pavlov or Watson mentioned. No Medjugorje?
WTF?

[Jamie Bright · Rating 3 out of 5]

The psychology/sociology is interesting, but the story is too disjointed and doesn't flow well.