A list of quotes about Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (Viking, 2015)

 

  1. “Wonderfully erudite, informative, and splendidly well written. Helps to explain and prevent the kinds of debilitating anxieties all of us face in this increasingly stressful world. Any author who can weave Leonard Bernstein, W. H. Auden, The Rolling Stones, and Alfred E. Neuman into a single illustrative example is on my short list for favorite writers ever.”

    —    Daniel J. Levitin, author of The Organized Mind and This Is Your Brain On Music

  2. “Mr. LeDoux offers a careful tour through the current neuroscience of fear and anxiety. . . . [Anxious] will reward the informed reader.”

    —    Leonore Tiefer, The Wall Street Journal

  3. “This impressive book is long, detailed and deep. LeDoux persuades us with reason and the power of critical thinking. He is a true scientist, and here, in his third book, there is maturity, there is breadth. You will know more than you did, and you will start to think differently about what it means to be afraid."

    —    Tristan A Bekinschtein, Times Higher Education Literary Supplement.

  4. “Every age believes itself to be the age of anxiety, as Auden’s famous poem first put it. But in his new book, Anxious, the neuroscientist and writer Joseph LeDoux suggests that that has never been a stronger claim to make than it is now . . . . If this is the age of anxiety, LeDoux is our Lewis and our Clark: It was LeDoux who laid down the first map of what is called the brain’s ‘fear circuit,’ the regions—centered on the amygdala and its adjacent structures—that together give rise to our ability to respond to threats and danger. But with his new book, he wants to redraw that map.”

    —    Casey Schwartz, New York Magazine

  5. “LeDoux presents a rigorous, in-depth guide to the history, philosophy and scientific exploration of this widespread emotional state. . . . Neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers and psychiatrists will find this exquisitely referenced book particularly useful. It is also a must-read for young investigators, and anyone perusing the footnotes will be rewarded with an insider’s view of the state and evolution of anxiety research. LeDoux’s charming personal asides give an impression of having a conversation with a world expert. LeDoux ends on a high note, describing how cutting-edge research on the neural substrates of anxiety is being translated into new approaches for psychiatric treatment.”

    —    Susanne Ahmari, Nature

  6. “LeDoux is not only a pioneer in the neurobiological analysis of fear in animals but also a scholarly and accessible writer. In Anxious, he systematically builds on his earlier works, covering with aplomb a vast literature on emotion, memory, attention, and consciousness. With that said, Anxious is a significant and important departure from the author’s earlier views on the neural underpinnings of fear. . . . In Anxious, LeDoux challenges the reader to think differently about the neural origins of fear and its disorders. In doing so, he offers a masterful synthesis of animal and human work and a novel roadmap for future work in both the laboratory and the clinic.”