Dear students,

I hope you have had a fine weekend and are enjoying the various religious and seasonal events. I'm in southern Florida, fabulous weather and good book events. I've been reading your crime posts with great interest. Sounds like those of you who went to Chauncey Bailey's murder trial have gotten a lot out of it. Hope the rest of you are having good luck.

Here are some instructions on your assignment on how to write a response paper to the book we all read:

Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters,

Please ask Ethan Watters questions about how he conducted his reporting, how many of the actual people affected by these various situations he talked to, especially the tsunami victims. I'm also curious about whether he heard from Amatruda after he published the book and what she thought of his conclusions. You, of course, will also have specific questions arising from reading the material. Remember to get some biographical information about him: age, education, where worked, why this story?

Your essay:

An opening paragraph that could do some or all of the following:

summarizes the main point of the book and the fact that Watters came to San Francisco State University's journalism department to talk to students about the book;

summarize Watters' research process and the reaction -- example: Journalist Ethan Watters spent five years researching his book, "Crazy Like Us, the Globalization of the American Psyche," but says his goal to raise issues about how Americans export both mental illnesses and their treatment protocols have had little impact. (I'm making this up; write what he actually says.)

It was while he was covering the tsunami in Sri Lanka and wondering about the hordes of mental health volunteers he kept running into that journalist Ethan Watters first decided to research how American culture, attitudes and treatments were affecting people in foreign lands. (I made that up too but something like that may prove to be true.

Nut graph(s) possibility: In a meeting with San Francisco State University's journalism students, Watters discussed his book Tuesday and said …. most important things he said. Which you can develop in a few subsequent paragraphs.

Background section: Summarize the book in less than a page, using examples (quotes) from the book to back up your main points, and using journalistic attribution combined with page numbers. For example:

Watters reported that much of the response to the Sri Lanka tsunami by Western therapists was disorganized and that the therapists sometimes competed with one another, "sometimes caus(ing) bad confusion and bad feelings among the survivors." (P. 78) He concluded that this caused not only confusion but also widewspread distribution of pharmaceuticals without adequate record-keeping or medical justification. "According to World Health Organization observers," Watters wrote, "fewer than half of the trauma counseling groups that flooded the country bothered to register with the government. Fewer still worked to coordinate their efforts with each other. 'There was no checking,' John Mahoney, the director of the World Health Organization's mental health initiative in Sri Lanka, told a reporter. 'We found one organization just handing out anti-depressants to people.'" (P. 81)

Your response to the book section (should be about a page and a half or a bit longer: Address the following questions, using examples as shown above, to support your reaction:

How does Watters do his reporting:

Example: Watters talked to many psycho-therapists and other mental health counselors who traveled to Sri Lanka after the tsunami that killed more than a quarter-million people on Christmas Day 2004, but often reached different conclusions about the validity of their work than they had. Watters tried to get one therapist, Kate Amatruda, nicknamed Kate Chaos because of her proclivity to respond to world disasters, to address what particular practices or ideas she had brought with her to Sri Lanka. Rather than detail what help she brought to the people there or what training techniques she had taught to native people, Watters reported that Amatruda declined to be specific. As he wrote, "It almost doesn't matter what you do," she insisted. "So much of it is showing up. It matters that you're there and that you're really there and you're able to witness the pain and the horror. You're there to witness and receive." (p. 95)

However, in this section he does not seem to have interviewed any of the clinicians that Amatruda trained or the survivors with whom she worked. (If I were there, I would ask him if he talked to many of the survivors in Sri Lanka who had contact with the mental health workers from America and other countries.)

This is only one example. Please analyze whether you thought he stepped into the story -- was he objective or trying to make a point? Did he do enough research to disprove his thesis?

Did you feel that he got both sides of each argument he made?

What was your personal reaction to the book?

It may be useful to respond to each chapter or some small anecdote from a few chapters.

I hope this is useful.

See you in a week and a day.

Yvonne

Thanks for your hard work, students.