Book of the week: My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind by Scott Stossel

(Knopf, $28)

“I feel rather fortunate not to be Scott Stossel,” said George Scialabba in Bookforum. One in four Americans will at some point experience an episode of debilitating anxiety, but this book’s author seems to have been condemned by anxiety disorders to a lifetime of psychic agony. Stossel, though high-functioning enough that he’s able to serve as editor of The Atlantic, suffers acute fears of heights, germs, cheese, and vomiting, to name but a few. He made his first visit to a psychiatric institution at age 10, and at 44 remains a slave to the potentiality of fresh panic. Still, he avoids treating his troubles too gravely. In this “extraordinary” work, he “manages to describe the most painful and embarrassing experiences in a style that’s candid but not melodramatic, heartrending but not self-pitying, wry but not cute.”

Stossel also happens to be a deft guide to humanity’s long struggle with anxiety, said Daniel Akst in The Wall Street Journal. Partly to understand his own struggles, Stossel has “wrapped his arms around a vast body of science and intellectual history.” Mankind, we learn, has been grappling with the off-program consequences of our “fight or flight” instinct for eons. As far back as the 4th century B.C., Hippocrates characterized pathological anxiety as a medical condition. Yet it was only in 1980 that the psychiatric profession created a separate diagnostic category for anxiety disorders, and doctors still struggle to determine their causes and cures. In his own life, Stossel has conducted “what amounts to a one-man tour” of talk-therapy solutions and sampled a rainbow of medications. Still, nothing he’s tried has put his anxiety attacks completely to rest.

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Readers might even feel as if they’re exploiting the author’s illness for their own gain, said Matthew Gilbert in The Boston Globe. “You have to wonder if My Age of Anxiety is so good, so copiously reported, in large part thanks to Stossel’s harsh expectations of himself, his gnawing terror of being revealed as a fraud.” He instead reveals himself in various other ways, including through one semicomic account of an ill-fated visit to the Kennedy family’s Cape Cod compound in which a bout of terror culminated in a nervous stomach and an overflowing toilet. Stossel offers no grand solutions to the problem of anxiety. But he leaves every reader who’s suffered its effects “the lingering hope that knowledge and understanding will ultimately, possibly, lead to empowerment.”