Böcker av Gail Bell

In the second Quarterly Essay of 2005, Gail Bell investigates Australia's depression epidemic. Why, she wonders, do well over a million Australians now take antidepressant drugs?This is a fresh, frank and independent look at the depression culture and the move to medicalise sadness. Bell examines how the prescription culture operates, scrutinising the role of big drug companies and GPs and talking to those who take - and don't take - the new antidepressants, from anxious students to lonely retirees. She finds that drug companies have invested billions in an effort to simplify a profoundly complex mental condition, and that along the way ordinary problems of living have been transformed into medical conditions. She also finds that we, the consumers, have been happy to get on board: the vocabulary of depression - "serotonin", "bipolar", "genetic predisposition" - rolls off our tongues as if each of us had studied it at medical school. In this freeranging and elegant essay, Bell takes the pulse of Australia's "worried well" and looks at alternative cures for what ails us.'If the number of prescriptions truly reflects the numbers who are depressed, then we may need to re-design our tourist brochures. The sun-bronzedAussie optimist with his no-worries attitude to calamity might be an outdated caricature.' Gail Bell, The Worried Well

Peyton Price was just a child when he made the decision to become a Christian in an old-fashioned, tent revival meeting in 1940''s rural Oklahoma. Immediately after, his father leaves the family for WWII when a mysterious white dog enters their lives, bringing unusual help and guidance in critical times. As Peyton grows older and many tragedies happen, the white dog seems to always appear at just the right time and place in their lives. From the Civil War to Vietnam, and everything in between, the Price family will demonstrate their strong belief in God, even when it doesn''t make sense. 

Winner of the NSW Premier's Literary AwardWhen Dr William Macbeth poisoned two of his sons in 1927, his wife and sister hid the murders in the intensely private realm of family secrets. Macbeth behaved as if he were immune to consequences and avoided detection and punishment.Or did he? Secrets can be as corrosive as poison, and as time passed, the story haunted and divided his descendants. His granddaughter, Gail Bell, spent ten years reading the literature of poisoning in order to understand Macbeth’s life. Herself a chemist, she listened for echoes in the great cases of the nineteenth century, in myths, fiction, and poison lore.Intricate, elegant, and beautifully realised, The Poison Principle is a masterful book about family secrets and literary poisonings.Praise for The Poison Principle by Gail Bell‘Miraculously well written, compellingly readable ... a book of rare distinction.’ The Times‘[Bell’s] solution to the mystery was – and is – a triumph of perseverance ... enthralling.’ The Guardian‘[The Poison Principle] … measures out, in small loving spoonfuls, grains of information about [a] family story … Between the quiet drip feed of her personal memoir, Bell mixes in stronger flavors: ingredients from criminology and psychology, botany and chemistry.’ The New York Times‘A gift of a story and Bell tells it to near perfection.’ The Age‘An elegantly written memoir about her search for the truth behind her family’s darkest secret … a fine thriller, a richly detailed pharmacopoeia and a splendid dissertation on references to poison in literature.’ The Sydney Morning Herald