There is so much more I wanted to post about residency, but I have returned home and have had to get right to studying. Remember that this is a 20 credit culminating study and unlike a 15 credit study instead of reading 20 books I have to read 27. I must say I love what I have read already. Here is what I posted on my annotated bib
Cole, Jonathan. About Face. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998.
Professor and neuroscientist Jonathan Cole does a wonderful job of highlighting the element of emotion, or lack of it expressed within a face. The book is just as the title describes, all about the face. The author takes an in-depth look at how emotion is received and expressed through the face. Cole examines such diseases as Parkinson’s where facial expression is lost or Mobius where nerve damage at birth causes individuals to not be able to have facial expression and discovers that many of these individuals tend to suffer from an inability to feel because they can not use their faces to express. “If emotions need expression through feelings in the body, it follows that a lack of experience of feeling from the face may lead to reduced ability for emotional experience itself” (193). He also examines a blind persons experience of understanding expression without seeing a face, and a baby’s ability to copy facial expression forty-five minutes after birth as well as the expressive faces of primates. Through his research on About Face he was asked to sit on the advisory council for Changing Faces, and organization that helps individuals learn social skills and teaches them how to cope with facial disfigurement.
As a sculptor who is seeking to find emotion involved in sculpting the face the book had many aspects that I loved, emotion, anatomy, neuroscience and psychology. I was however surprised that he did not speak more about the eyes, as they are often referred to by others as the windows to the soul.
About Face is a wonderful addition to my research on capturing the spirits of my subjects and feeling the emotions felt by others and myself.
Field, Tiffany. Touch. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001.
Developmental psychologist and founder of the Touch Research Institute introduces the reader to the importance of touch for personal growth and well being from birth to old age. Field offers numerous studies in such areas as lack of touch and the affects on the immune system as well as touch to help with stress, pain, sleep even areas that most people would not associate with touch like autism and attention deficit disorder. The stigma of touch in America and the social patterns of other societies concerning touch are also examined. The book is a great introduction to this sense with footnotes for further research.
Reliand, Rachel. Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder. Minnesota: Hazelden, 2004.
Get me out of here is a wonderful and moving account of one person’s experience of discovering their mental illness and finding the miracle of healing through therapy. The book walks you through the journey of Rachel Reiland’s (a pseudoname) diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and her four years of therapy and hospitalizations. The traumatic incidence revealed in this very personal journal exhibit the extreme burden that borderline personality disorder has on loved ones and the incredible heavy burden that the individual must carry as they try to make their way through life. Reiland reinforces that this is her journey through mental illness and is not meant to be a “cookie cutter” example.
Further information is provided in the back of the book that includes online resources, other books and organizations covering the subject of mental illness.
Alice, Sebold. The Lovely Bones. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002.
A wonderful novel about a fourteen-year-old girl named Susie Salmon who is brutally murdered and reveals her feelings and thoughts as she watches her family from heaven. Though the book is somewhat disturbing and sad at first, if one can get past the first chapter the reward is a refreshing thought of loved ones watching out for us that will keep the reader spell bound. Sebold who also writes for the New York Times and Chicago Tribune has the ability to keep the interest and peak the intrigue of the reader. It is rewarding to walk through the grief of the Salmon family and observe the healing.
Taylor, Karen. Forensic Art and Illustration Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2001.
As a contributor to Fox Televisions Most Wanted, and a former sculptor for Madame Tussaruds Wax Museum, as well as forensic art instructor for the FBI, Taylor’s credentials are impressive. Forensic Art and Illustration covers a vast amount of material on forensic art including the history of forensic art in the 1800’s with the Bertillion System of Anthropometrical Identification. There are chapters on what it means to be a forensic artist, the psychology involved in forensic art, working with witnesses, dealing with testimony and the ethics of being a forensic artist. Though a great deal of the book works with drawings that are used to either locate suspects or identify victims, as a sculptor my favorite sections were the sculpture and age progression. The section on age progression was helpful but left me wanting more. A contributing author, retired forensic artist Betty Gatliff, provides a chapter on three-dimensional facial reconstruction that is wonderful. All in all Forensic Art and Illustration is a comprehensive book with many photographs and diagrams to assist those interested in forensic art.
