Ian Tymms > Recent Status Updates

Love the premise. Agree wholeheartedly with the need to focus more on what’s “upstream” but no so sure about creating upstream and downstream as a binary rather than a whole. In the example of the need to understand and address causes of a headache rather than take an aspirin, why not do both? Stop tomorrow’s headache by addressing the cause and take an easy solution to stop today’s as well.

Superb storytelling.

Superb Scholarship which somehow manages to show the depth of the issues without losing sight of the breadth of the historical vision.

Reading again after many years. So delightful.

Dickens’ prose is superb and his character portraits delight but the narrative has as much attraction for me as 1980s daytime TV. I wanted to come back to Dickens and love him. I tried but I couldn’t.

Reminds me of Jarred Diamond in style and scope and shear reading pleasure.

I was asked to read this because there was concern expressed about whether it should be in our school library. I can see where the concerns may come from as there are some drawings and references to the author’s sex life early on. But, as always, context and purpose are everything. This is a serious graphic novel about a serious topic - mental health - and it is seriously well written.

"Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it."

Powerful and confronting.