Esquire writing - new feature by D'Agostino on ADHD & old one by Junod on Mr. Rogers

The latest issue of Esquire had a great feature by Ryan D'Agostino titled "The Drugging of the American Boy" on ADHD. D'Agostino covers the huge increase in it being diagnosed (particularly in boys) and also written about in captivating form is an alternate approach towards treatment as practiced by therapist and author of Transforming the Difficult Child, Howard Glasser.

Also posted to the Esquire website last month was a story I posted on previously, but that hadn't been online at the Esquire site. "Can You Say... Hero?" was by Tom Junod on Mr. Rogers and one of the most memorable magazine pieces I've read.

"Driving Mr. Albert" by Michael Paterniti

Driving Mr. Albert by Michael Paterniti was a tremendously well written and interesting book that worked on multiple levels.

It's subtitled A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain and is a first-person account of Paterniti travelling cross-country with Thomas Harvey, the man who performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein in 1955 and  then kept his brain.

The book provides interesting detail on Einstein himself, but also serves as a road trip tale and most profoundly, feels to be an examination of people's lives and how the intersect with others and the meaning derived from that. This most specifically could refer to Harvey in relation to Einstein, but also Paterniti in relation to Harvey and both Paterniti and Harvey and their interactions with others.

 Really just riveting content that Paterniti weaves together in a melodic fashion with very much the concept of writing about something specific (in this case, a road trip with Einstein's brain), but doing so in pursuit of a much larger idea (a look at the aforementioned relationships).

Paterniti definitely put his time into the book with his research taking him (in addition to simply the cross-country drive) to both England and Japan and in terms of how open (including about himself) Paterniti was in Driving Mr. Albert, it reminded me of both The Tender Bar (which I reviewed here) by J.R. Moehringer and Bird by Bird (which I reviewed here) by Anne Lamott.... with the Lamott phrase "warts and all" coming to mind.

I first came across Paterniti from his GQ story "The Man Who Sailed His House" and his next book is The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese. Releasing on July 30th, it's reviewed by Ryan D'Agostino in a brief  Esquire piece that includes language which for me could also describe what made Driving Mr. Albert so great...

"Paterniti is a master of finding and telling great stories (the finding, for most writers, often being as difficult as the telling) that appear to be about something small, such as cheese, but are actually about something far larger — in this case, the whole of human existence."

Writing from Feb '12 Esquire Magazine

Latest issue of Esquire had a number of pieces that didn't necessarily stand out for the flowery prose, but were well written and on interesting topics (or at least contained interesting tidbits).

Lengthiest feature was Counter-Terrorism Is Getting Complicated by Tom Junod on a Federal conspiracy to commit terrorism case against retired Navyman Fred Thomas and three other seventy-somethings in rural Georgia. Detailed what was either a proactive ferreting out of terrorist ambitions or a shady government informant leading disillusioned old people down the path of horrible crimes they would have never committed.

Two other interesting features from this issue involved the topic of information and how it's acquired, used and communicated. The Man Who Knows Everything was written by Ryan D'Agostino and profiles Tibco Software and it's CEO Vivek Ranadive. Tibco provides infrastructure software and goes beyond this to efforts like it's TopCom communications platform for use by world leaders. A second Esquire piece around information was If You Could Master All the Data in the World... penned by Chris Jones. Story is on Jeopardy winner Roger Craig and the work he did to identify knowledge needed to be successful on the show. Out of this, Craig is now attempting to take this idea of learning patterns and attempt to pass it along commercially.

Finally, this Esquire edition also contained two celebrity pieces that contained nuggets of interest. Ricky Gervais: The ESQ+A was done by Scott Raab and had some very cool content from Gervais about staying true to himself in his work. A cynic could say it's easy to do that when already successful, but there's probably also a lot to be said for the idea of this approach helping someone make it in the first place. Also interesting was Mike Sager's Who Doesn't Love Woody Harrelson? which included quite a bit on Harrelson's avoidance of chemicals and processed/artificial food.