by Charlotte E. Thompson, MD, ill., New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 1999, $25

Raising a Child With a Neuromuscular Disorder, written by the author of Raising a Handicapped Child, Charlotte E. Thompson, MD, provides a comprehensive and compassionate guide primarily for families of children with neuromuscular disorders. Basic medical information for a range of disorders is provided, but the focus is on practical advice. Topics covered include how to deal with diagnosis, when to get a second opinion, general medical care issues, emotional health, school programs, day to day activities, and how to deal with the death of a child. The book is easy to read and accurate. A resource directory provided toward the end of the book will prove helpful to families. However, parents often seek information on medication currently available and medications being studied. Many go immediately to the Internet, where the information is not always accurate or specific to their own child’s case. Recommendations regarding the best means to acquire up to date scientific information and ongoing clinical trials would be useful but is not provided.

by Antonio Culebras, MD, New York, NY, Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1999, $185

The field of sleep medicine has millennia of recorded history from which to draw its anecdotal clinical data, but in our era of high technology investigation it is a relative newcomer to the feast of physiologic correlation, especially with regard to the neuroanatomic basis for sleep regulation. It is entirely appropriate, then, that Dr. Culebras has opened his multiauthored text with a historical perspective, in which Dr. Michael Thorpy has interspersed brief quotations from the writings of Homer and Sophocles, mixed with scientific and philosophical musings from the likes of Freud and Dement. The text is directed toward clinical neurologists, and sets out to provide more detailed attention …