From Publishers Weekly
If exuberance is "the passion for life," then Jamison's enthusiasm and sense of wonder about the subject proves as fine an example as any examined in her newest work. Expert in the arena of mood and temperament, Jamison (An Unquiet Mind; Night Falls Fast; Touched with Fire) detours from her usual analysis of mood disorders in favor of the livelier side of personality. She examines the contagious nature of exuberance, which she defines as "a psychological state characterized by high mood and high energy," offering diverse examples that range from John Muir and FDR to Mary Poppins and Peter Pan. Having in mind the simply put idea that "those who are exuberant act," the author details the energetic efforts of scientists, naturalists, politicians and even her meteorologist father. The dual nature of humanity is a common theme, as Jamison distinguishes between introversion and extroversion, nature and nurture, and healthy emotion and pathology. Such analysis is at times thorough to the point of redundancy, and even the most interested reader may find parts of the book exhausting to navigate. But Jamison makes up for it with her contagious enthusiasm for the subject—a mood that will make readers feel, well, exuberant. Perhaps Snoopy explains it best when, as exemplified in a comic strip here, he leaps for joy, waxing philosophically: "To those of us with real understanding, dancing is the only pure art form.... To live is to dance, to dance is to live." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
"Exuberance," Jamison says, "is an abounding, ebullient, effervescent emotion." She celebrates a galaxy of exuberant figures. Theodore Roosevelt was "incapable of being indifferent." Wilson Bentley, a New England farmer who made himself a respected expert on the crystal structure of snowflakes, "was as exuberant in pursuit of them as they were in their numbers." The eminent physicist Richard Feynman "was an exuberant teacher in every way." Jamison also celebrates exuberant characters in literature, including Tigger, Toad and Snoopy. Professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, she is concerned that exuberance "has not been a mainstay of psychological research" but sees signs that it is receiving more scholarly attention. She has produced an exuberant book.

Editors of Scientific American

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
"I was fortunate to grow up around exuberance," writes Kay Redfield Jamison in her latest investigation into the link between moods and creativity. "My father . . . was surrounded by ebullient friends and colleagues who were scientists or mathematicians," she recalls. "They were utterly captivated by the same things that enthrall children -- stars, fireflies, wind, why a frog is marked the way it is." Exuberant personalities, she argues, respond to the world differently from the rest of us -- with more passion and with the desire to engage. The word itself derives from the Latin (ex + uberare), "to be fruitful, to be abundant," and Jamison illustrates how exuberance can transform mere curiosity into the quest for knowledge and, ultimately, the discovery of new worlds. She also argues for a genetic predisposition for the exuberant personality and makes a rather startling claim in the book's final chapter. Jamison's landmark 1993 book, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, demonstrated a high correlation between poets and madness -- more specifically, manic-depressive or bipolar illness (Jamison prefers the former, older label because it's more descriptive). The best way to convey the experience of a mood disorder, she argued, is to turn to those who have written about what it's like to suffer from one. Citing scientific studies as well as personal accounts from diaries, essays and poems written by bipolar sufferers (including a pantheon of great poets, such as Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Gerard Manley Hopkins and her lodestar poet, Lord Byron), Jamison illustrated how the altered brain chemistry of manic states enhances word association, improves rhyming skills, elevates energy and inspires grandiosity -- all useful ingredients in the making of a poet. The poet William Meredith described one of Lowell's manic attacks in which "he writes and revises translations furiously and with a kind [of] crooked brilliance, and talks about himself in connection with Achilles, Alexander, Hart Crane, Hitler, and Christ, and breaks your heart." What prevents this equation from sounding reductive is Jamison's deep knowledge of and respect for artistic achievement; she's that rare writer who can offer a kind of unified field theory of science and art. A clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry, an author of a standard medical text and numerous scientific papers on mood disorders, Jamison was also granted an honorary professorship of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She introduced her study as "a book about artists and their voyages, moods as their ships of passage, and the ancient persistent belief that there exists such a thing as a 'fine madness.' " In Exuberance, Jamison's fourth book, she describes her subject as a desirable and nonpathological state of heightened awareness that gives rise to courage, discovery and creativity. She places it along the continuum leading to mania but shows how exuberance differs from its pathological neighbor: "Although most exuberant people never become manic," she says, "those who have bipolar illness often have an exuberant temperament." Where Touched with Fire illustrated a link between manic depression and poetic achievement, Exuberance correlates this emotion with qualities of leadership, courage and discovery in various fields of endeavor. Her exemplars, among many others, include Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist John Muir and mathematician Richard Feynman.Jamison begins by noting the link between extraversion and exuberance, emphasizing the importance of play in children and in the animal kingdom. Play encourages fearlessness -- that is, the readiness to explore one's world. She describes play as "a kind of controlled adventure" that tests boundaries, rewards flexibility and prepares one for the unpredictable. Humans, she notes, "are uniquely playful and exploratory animals," and she cites studies correlating high playfulness in children with high creativity. "Play is not a luxury," she reminds us -- it's a necessity and one that's dwindling in our culture. She notes that today's children have 40 percent less free time to play than 20 years ago.Though Jamison cites studies suggesting the genetic basis for an exuberant temperament, humans -- and animals, for that matter, from mice to elephants -- have found ways to induce exuberance. After all, exuberance excites the brain's pleasure centers, and Jamison takes us on a fascinating tour of activities and substances that serve as enhancers. There are the usual euphoriants (alcohol, cocaine, hashish, ecstasy), which produce the desired state but always exact a price ("pharmacological law: what goes up must come down"). In the 18th century, nitrous oxide was all the rage, enjoyed at dinner parties and at "laughing gas evenings" in London theaters. Poet Robert Southey described it as "oh, excellent air-bag! . . . I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder-working gas of delight!" The euphoriant gas ethylene, she notes, escaped through a fault line at the Delphic oracle, inspiring the seers to prophesy after they inhaled Delphi's "sacred fumes." Dance (preferably of the orgiastic variety) and anticipation of pleasurable events (dinner with a friend, for example) are also euphoriants, as are gambling, music, the thrill of discovery and the lure of the unknown. More surprisingly, according to an ethnobotanist she cites: fasting, thirsting, self-mutilation, sleep deprivation, bleeding, immersion in ice water, self-flagellation, hypnosis, meditation, drumming, chanting, pungent scents and sweat lodges have all been used to induce euphoric states. Jamison describes how two exuberant personalities came together in the early years of the last century to recognize the importance of preserving wilderness -- wildness -- in the American continent: Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir. Roosevelt's high enthusiasm for life was so remarkable that one journalist wrote, "You go into Roosevelt's presence . . . and you go home and wring the personality out of your clothes." His enthusiasm for natural history and the American landscape met its match in the Scottish immigrant John Muir, whose book, My First Summer in the Sierra, was described as a journal of "a soul on fire."("Exhilarated with the mountain air," he wrote, "I feel like shouting this morning with excess of wild animal joy.") The two men hiked the Sierras together in May of 1903, and shortly after that trip Roosevelt announced his intention to protect America's forest lands for future generations.America itself, Jamison points out, was explored by Pilgrims and pioneers whose exuberant, questing spirit was passed on to their descendants. Americans seem to value optimism and enthusiasm; "in a country that gave birth to Walt Whitman and John Philip Sousa," she writes, "invented jazz, square dancing, and rock and roll, gave the world Chuck Yeager, Ted Turner, and P.T. Barnum, created Oklahoma!, and glories in Louis Armstrong and Theodore Roosevelt -- Americans see enthusiasm as an advantage." Her most startling claim derives from what she sees as the necessary exuberance of America's pioneers. Because "high rates of manic-depressive illness have been observed in American immigrant groups," she wonders if "individuals who sought the new, who took risks that others would not, or who rebelled against repressive social systems may have been more likely to immigrate to America and, once there, to succeed." Though Americans have long prided themselves on being of courageous, adventurous stock, Jamison suggests that the scientific evidence may bear that out. Jamison draws on the accounts of a wide range of exuberant personalities, from Winston Churchill, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley (who through his obsession with snowflakes famously discovered that no two were alike), to P.T. Barnum. Indeed, her wide sampling of personal accounts of exuberance enlivens what might otherwise be a rather dry tour of twin and animal behavior studies. One occasionally misses the harrowing narrative of her own journey through the horrors of manic-depressive illness as recounted in her autobiographical An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, published soon after Touched with Fire. Instead, she often leavens the science with whimsy. For example, to find descriptions of exuberant personalities in popular culture, she turns to children's literature, quoting from The Wind and the Willows, Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins -- and even citing cartoonist Charles Schulz's occasional embodiment of exuberance, Snoopy. "Snoopy is a seriously exuberant animal," she writes. "He is also independent, quirky, debonair . . . and an incurable romantic." She revives "galumphing" from Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark and Through the Looking Glass, a word that "completely captures the joy and bounce of play." But her wit does not undermine her serious investigation of a seldom-studied mood. Jamison reminds us that exuberance, because it is not a pathological state, has been given short shrift as an object of study. "Exuberance . . . has never been a mainstay of psychological research," she writes. "For every hundred journal articles on sadness or depression . . . only one is published about happiness." The relative paucity is understandable; why study a condition if it's not a problem? For Jamison, however, the origins and mystery of creativity have long been her holy grail, and she argues -- with her usual wit, ingenuity and panache -- that exuberance is one of its wellsprings.Jamison has by now produced an impressive and thorough investigation of moods and mood disorder studied from all angles, including the most personal. She has gone far in expanding her field to include creativity and the arts in her quest "to understand passion, imagination, and the nature of human greatness." Reviewed by Nancy Schoenberger Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
In three controversial if well-received books, Jamison previously examined manic depression, bipolar personality disorder, suicide, and their relation to creativity. Exuberance, which explores the biological and evolutionary roots of happiness, switches gears. Jamison approaches her subject by offering up diverse case studies, from animals to the accomplishments of writers, politicians, and scientists. While entertaining and informative (few scientists study happiness), her unflagging exuberance and addiction to example after example get tiresome. She often attributes every happy feeling under the sun, from love to ambition, to exuberance. Until it "gets more scrutiny from science," concludes the Baltimore Sun, "this champagne of emotions will remain hard to define." And yet, you know it when you feel it. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Jamison, a psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins, continues to produce groundbreaking work, following her controversial Touched with Fire (1996), in which she links artistic temperament and manic depression; An Unquiet Mind (1995), in which she took huge professional and personal risks by revealing herself to be bipolar; and Night Falls Fast (1999), in which she correlates depression with suicide. Now Jamison switches to the brighter side of the mind and explores exuberance, a contagious high mood and energy state that is engaging, sometimes transfiguring, and essential to our existence. Exuberance is derived from the natural world in which play, which links with curiosity and learning, is "nearly universal in the more cognitively complex animals." Play and exuberance are central to the development of chimps and rats, and even cause porcupines to dance. As to humans, Jamison cites Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and James Watson as examples of exuberance coupled with leadership abilities, as well as a master of mood manipulation, P. T. Barnum, as she examines people's search for this buoyancy, this elated mood, this "need to throw up sky-rockets" via dance, music, entertainment, and drugs. Throughout, Jamison's writing flows with the powerful passion it celebrates, capturing the reader's attention from the start. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Inside Flap
The author of the bestselling An Unquiet Mind–and internationally renowned authority on mood disorders–now gives us something wonderfully different: an exploration of exuberance and how it fuels our most important creative and scientific achievements.

John Muir’s lifelong passion to save America’s wild places, Wilson Bentley’s legendary obsession to record for posterity the beauty of individual snowflakes, the boundless scientific curiosity behind Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA, sea lions that surf and porcupines that dance–Kay Redfield Jamison shows how these and many more examples both human and animal define the nature of exuberance, and how this exuberance relates to intellectual searching, risk-taking, creativity, and survival itself. She examines the hereditary predisposition to exuberance; the role of the brain chemical dopamine; the connection between positive moods and psychological resilience; and the differences between exuberance and mania. She delves into some of the phenomena of exuberance–the contagiousness of laughter, the giddiness of new love, the intoxicating effects of music and of religious ecstasy–while also addressing the dangerous desire to simulate exuberance by using drugs or alcohol. In a fascinating and intimate coda to the rest of the book, renowned scientists, writers, and politicians share their thoughts on the forms and role of exuberance in their own lives.

Original, inspiring, authoritative, Exuberance brims with the very energy and passion that it celebrates.

About the Author
Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as Honorary Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of the national best sellers An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, and Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. She is coauthor of the standard medical text on manic-depressive illness and author or coauthor of more than one hundred scientific papers about mood disorders, creativity, and psychopharmacology. Dr. Jamison, the recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards, was distinguished lecturer at Harvard University in 2002 and the Litchfield lecturer at the University of Oxford in 2003. She is a John P. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One

"Incapable of Being Indifferent"

It is a curious request to make of God. Shield your joyous ones, asks the Anglican prayer: Shield your joyous ones. God more usually is asked to watch over those who are ill or in despair, as indeed the rest of the prayer makes clear. "Watch now those who weep this day," it goes. "Rest your weary ones; soothe your suffering ones." The joyous tend to be left to their own devices, the exuberant even more so.

Perhaps this is just as well. Those inclined toward exuberance have enjoyed the benign neglect of my field. Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalogue the morbid emotions-depression, anger, anxiety-and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones. Not unlike God, if only in this one regard, my colleagues and I have tended more to those in the darkness than to those in the light. We have given sorrow many words, but a passion for life few.

Yet it is the infectious energies of exuberance that proclaim and disperse much of what is marvelous in life. Exuberance carries us places we would not otherwise go-across the savannah, to the moon, into the imagination-and if we ourselves are not so exuberant we will, caught up in the contagious joy of those who are,

be inclined collectively to go yonder. By its pleasures, exuberance lures us from our common places and quieter moods; and-after the victory, the harvest, the discovery of a new idea or an unfamiliar place-it gives ascendant reason to venture forth all over again. Delight is its own reward, adventure its own pleasure.

Exuberance is an abounding, ebullient, effervescent emotion. It is kinetic and unrestrained, joyful, irrepressible. It is not happiness, although they share a border. It is instead, at its core, a more restless, billowing state. Certainly it is no lulling sense of contentment: exuberance leaps, bubbles, and overflows, propels its energy through troop and tribe. It spreads upward and outward, like pollen toted by dancing bees, and in this carrying ideas are moved and actions taken. Yet exuberance and joy are fragile matter. Bubbles burst; a wince of disapproval can cut dead a whistle or abort a cartwheel. The exuberant move above the horizon, exposed and vulnerable.

Exuberance keeps occasional company with grief, though grief may command the greater mention. Blake's belief that "Under every grief & pine/Runs a joy with silken twine" is a received theme in folklore. Our greatest joys and sorrows ripen on the same vine, says the American proverb. Danger and delight grow on one stalk, maintains the English one. Intense emotions inhabit a correspondent territory: joy may be our wings and sorrow our spurs, but the boundaries between the moods are open. Wings and high moods are shivery things; the joyous do indeed need shielding.

Exuberance is a vital emotion; it demands not only defense but exposure, for despair far more than joy has found sympathy with poets and scholars. Joy lacks the gravitas that suffering so effortlessly commands. Joy without reflection is evanescent; without counterweight, it has no weight at all. Or so one would think.

Yet joy is essential to our existence. Exuberance, joy's more energetic relation, occupies an ancient region of our mammalian selves, and one to which we owe in no small measure our survival and triumphs. It is a material part of our pursuits-love, games, hunting and war, exploration-and it is a vibrant force to signal victory, proclaim a time to quicken, to draw together, to exult, to celebrate. Exuberance is ancient, material, and profound. "The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things," wrote Louis Pasteur. "They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language-the word 'enthusiasm'-en theos-a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it."

Like many essential human traits, exuberance is teeming in some and not to be caught sight of in others. For a few, exuberance is in the blood, an irrepressible life force. It may ebb and flow, but the underlying capacity for joy is as much a part of the person as having green eyes or a long waist. For them, as the psalm promises, a full joy cometh in the morning. Not so for most others. Exuberance is a more occasional thing, something to be experienced only at splendid moments of love or attainment, or known in youth but lost with time. The nonexuberant lack fizz and risibility: they need to be lifted up on the enthusiasm of others; roused by dance or drug; impelled by music. They do not kindle of their own accord.

Variation in temperament is necessary. Exuberance, indiscriminately apportioned, is anarchical. If all were effervescent, the world would be an exhausting and chaotic place, driven to incoherence by competing enthusiasms or becalmed by indifference to the day-to-day requirements of life. Our species, like most, is well served by a diversity of temperaments, a variety of energies and moods. Exuberance is a fermenting, pushing-upward-and-forward force, but sometimes fixity is critical to survival. The joyous, and the not so, need one another in order to survive.

I believe that exuberance is incomparably more important than we acknowledge. If, as it has been claimed, enthusiasm finds the opportunities and energy makes the most of them, a mood of mind that yokes the two is formidable indeed. Exuberant people take in the world and act upon it differently than those who are less lively and less energetically engaged. They hold their ideas with passion and delight, and they act upon them with dispatch. Their love of life and of adventure is palpable. Exuberance is a peculiarly pleasurable state, and in that pleasure is power.

"Why should man want to fly at all?" asked Charles Lindbergh. "People often ask these questions. But what civilization was not founded on adventure, and how long could one exist without it? Some answer the attainment of knowledge. Some say wealth, or power, is sufficient cause. I believe the risks I take are justified by the sheer love of the life I lead." Man's exuberant spirit of adventure, Lindbergh argued elsewhere, is beyond his power to control. "Our earliest records," he said, "tell of biting the apple and baiting the dragon, regardless of hardship or of danger, and from this inner drive, perhaps, progress and civilization developed. We moved from land to sea, to air, to space, era on era, our aspirations rising."

Psychologists, who in recent years have taken up the study of positive emotions, find that joy widens one's view of the world and expands imaginative thought. It activates. It makes both physical and intellectual exploration more likely, and it provides reward for problems solved or risks taken. Through its positive energies, it heals as well. One joy, the Chinese believe, scatters a hundred griefs, and certainly it can be an antidote to fatigue and discouragement. Into those set back by failure, joy transfuses hope.

Exuberance is also, at its quick, contagious. As it spreads pell-mell throughout a group, exuberance excites, it delights, and it dispels tension. It alerts the group to change and possibility. Ted Turner, who would know, believes a leader is someone with the ability to "create infectious enthusiasm." This is a defining quality of great teachers, statesmen, and adventurers. Put to good use, infectious enthusiasm is a wonderful thing; used badly, it is calamitous.

Mostly, exuberance is a bounty and a blessing. It has its dangers, and we shall examine them in depth, but it is, all told, an amazing thing. Amazing and, on occasion, transfiguring. This was indisputably the case in May 1903, when two bounding enthusiasts hiked together in Yosemite. One was the President of the United States, the other a Scottish celebrant of the American wilderness. They were both, by temperament, utterly incapable of being indifferent.

Life for Theodore Roosevelt, said one friend, was the "unpacking of endless Christmas stockings." This would have gotten no argument from Roosevelt, a man who well into his fifties delighted in Christmas as an occasion of "literally delirious joy," and who believed that the entirety of life was a Great Adventure. The man "who knows the great enthusiasms," he held, lays claim to the high triumphs of life.

Born in 1858 into one of New York City's wealthiest families, Theodore Roosevelt seems to have burst into the world a full-throated exuberant. For this, he owed a considerable debt to his father. "I never knew any one who got greater joy out of living than did my father," he wrote, and the seasons of his childhood, so beholden to his father's love and enthusiasms, "went by in a round of uninterrupted and enthralling pleasures." From his earliest days he exulted in life. At the age of ten, he wrote to his mother with breathless enthusiasm: "What an excitement to have received your letter. My mouth opened wide with astonish [sic] when I heard how many flowers were sent in to you. I could revel in the buggie ones. I jumped with delight when I found you heard the mocking bird."

Roosevelt, years later, was still jumping. One debutante said he did not so much dance as "hop." Another recounted his "unquenchable gaiety" and his unerring ability at formal dinner parties to send her into such uncontrollable fits of laughter that she had no choice but to leave the table. His Harvard classmates depicted him as a fast-moving, rapid-talking enthusiast who often wore them out with his boisterous exuberance. He held his far-flung interests with delight and stocked his college rooms with piles of books, a large tortoise, sundry snakes, and a collection of lobsters. He zoomed, he bolted, he boomed and gesticulated wildly as he went.

Roosevelt's vivacity receded when his father died. He felt, he said, as though "I should almost perish." It was a devastating loss. For the rest of his life he would miss, though himself incorporate, his father's rare mixture of infectious joy and keen sense of public duty. "Sometimes, when I fully realize my loss," he wrote in his diary a few months after his father's death, "I feel as if I should go mad."

Stoked by a restless energy not uncommon in those with exuberant temperaments, Roosevelt drove his desolation into action. He rowed, hiked, hunted, boxed, and swam furiously during the fevered weeks following his father's death. With slight cause other than annoyance he impetuously shot and killed a neighbor's dog. He nearly drove his horse into the ground through reckless gallops in the Oyster Bay countryside and was no easier on himself: "He'll kill himself before he'll even say he's tired," remarked one doctor of Roosevelt's frenetic behavior. Yet through it all there remained an irrepressible sense of life: "I am of a very buoyant temper," he wrote his sister not long after their father died. It was a temper that would serve him well and ill, but mostly well.

In the years immediately following his father's death, Roosevelt fell passionately in love, married, graduated from law school, and published the first of the nearly forty books he would go on to write. In 1881 he was elected to the New York State Assembly, where, as he put it, he "rose like a rocket." An ardent reformer, and lustily so throughout his political life, he became a mercurial, unstoppable irritant to his fellow Republicans.

Roosevelt's life in politics was abruptly broken when, on St. Valentine's Day of 1884, both his wife and his mother died. "You could not talk to him about it," said a close friend. He drew a cross in his diary for the date of the fourteenth of February and wrote, "The light has gone out of my life." In a pitch of energy reminiscent of the period following his father's death, Roosevelt abruptly took off for the Dakota Badlands, where he lived out his convic-tion that "black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough." He hunted, wrote an improbable number of books, and ran a cattle ranch. The hard work ultimately made wide inroads into his grief. "We felt the beat of hardy life in our veins," he wrote later in his autobiography, "and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living." Despite his distress, he said, "I enjoyed life to the full."

He returned to the East, remarried, and threw himself back into politics with gusto. He became a gale force in Washington. President Benjamin Harrison, who had appointed him civil service commissioner, said that the crusading Roosevelt "wanted to put an end to all the evil in the world between sunrise and sunset." Rudyard Kipling found himself caught up in a gentler form of Roosevelt's persuasive energies and, like most, he was completely captivated. After dining with him one evening at the Cosmos Club in Washington, Kipling knew himself bewitched: "I curled up on the seat opposite and listened and wondered until the universe seemed to be spinning around and Theodore was the spinner."

Roosevelt loped onward from post to post. He served energetically as assistant secretary of the Navy, and then led the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the "Rough Riders," during the Spanish-American War. His zest for war, as for life, knew few limits. He had, one journalist put it, enough "energy and enthusiasm to inspire a whole regiment." Roosevelt exulted that the war was "bully," "the great day" of his life. It was, he said, his "crowded hour." He seemed to relish his brushes with death as passionately as he loved the rest of life. He was recommended for the Medal of Honor and returned to politics a war hero, a legend. He was elected governor of New York and then, within a few years' time, vice president of the United States. When William McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, Roosevelt became, at the age of forty-two, the youngest president in American history. He was also the liveliest.

The new president's exuberance was captured by a reporter from the New York Times: "The President goes from one to another . . . always speaking with great animation, gesturing freely, and in fact talking with his whole being, mouth, eyes, forehead, cheeks and neck all taking their mobile parts. . . . A hundred times a day the President will laugh, and when he laughs he does it with the same energy with which he talks. It is usually a roar of laughter, and it comes nearly every five minutes . . . sometimes he doubles up in paroxysm. You don't smile with Mr. Roosevelt; you shout with laughter with him, and then you shout again while he tries to cork up more laugh[ter] and sputters: 'Come gentlemen,let us be serious.' " Another journalist wrote, "You go into Roosevelt's presence . . . and you go home and wring the personality out of your clothes."

The White House rang out not only with laughter but with the squeals of children and the clattering of their ponies going up and down the marble stairs of the presidential mansion. Roosevelt was frequently to be found chasing or being chased by his children and their animals around the White House grounds. "You must always remember," said a British diplomat, "the President is about six." Certainly Roosevelt did nothing to dispel that impression. His zeal was infectious.

FROM OUR EDITORS

In her 1995 book The Unquiet Mind, Kay Jamison surveyed depression. In this book, she explores exuberance in all its joyous shades. Focusing on people and characters as various as naturalist John Muir and Pooh's friend Tigger, she reflects on how unrestrained passion and playfulness is related to both risk taking and creativity. Uplifting in subject and style.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

John Muir's lifelong passion to save America's wild places, Wilson Bentley's legendary obsession to record for posterity the beauty of individual snowflakes, the boundless scientific curiosity behind Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA, sea lions that surf and porcupines that dance - Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison shows how these and many more examples, both human and animal, define the nature of exuberance and how this quality relates to intellectual searching, risk-taking, creativity, and survival itself. She examines the hereditary predisposition to exuberance, the role of the brain chemical dopamine, the connection between positive moods and psychological resilience, and the differences between exuberance and mania. She delves into the phenomena of exuberance - the contagiousness of laughter, the giddiness of new love, the intoxicating effects of music and of religious ecstasy - while also addressing the dangerous desire to simulate exuberance by using drugs or alcohol. In a fascinating and intimate coda to the rest of the book, renowned scientists, writers, and politicians share their thoughts on the forms and role of exuberance in their own lives.

SYNOPSIS

Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as Honorary Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of the national best sellers An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, and Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. She is coauthor of the standard medical text on manic-depressive illness and author or coauthor of more than one hundred scientific papers about mood disorders, creativity, and psychopharmacology. Dr. Jamison, the recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards, was distinguished lecturer at Harvard University in 2002 and the Litchfield lecturer at the University of Oxford in 2003. She is a John P. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow.

FROM THE CRITICS

Nancy Schoenberger - The Washington Post

Jamison has by now produced an impressive and thorough investigation of moods and mood disorder studied from all angles, including the most personal. She has gone far in expanding her field to include creativity and the arts in her quest "to understand passion, imagination, and the nature of human greatness."

Publishers Weekly

If exuberance is "the passion for life," then Jamison's enthusiasm and sense of wonder about the subject proves as fine an example as any examined in her newest work. Expert in the arena of mood and temperament, Jamison (An Unquiet Mind; Night Falls Fast; Touched with Fire) detours from her usual analysis of mood disorders in favor of the livelier side of personality. She examines the contagious nature of exuberance, which she defines as "a psychological state characterized by high mood and high energy," offering diverse examples that range from John Muir and FDR to Mary Poppins and Peter Pan. Having in mind the simply put idea that "those who are exuberant act," the author details the energetic efforts of scientists, naturalists, politicians and even her meteorologist father. The dual nature of humanity is a common theme, as Jamison distinguishes between introversion and extroversion, nature and nurture, and healthy emotion and pathology. Such analysis is at times thorough to the point of redundancy, and even the most interested reader may find parts of the book exhausting to navigate. But Jamison makes up for it with her contagious enthusiasm for the subject-a mood that will make readers feel, well, exuberant. Perhaps Snoopy explains it best when, as exemplified in a comic strip here, he leaps for joy, waxing philosophically: "To those of us with real understanding, dancing is the only pure art form.... To live is to dance, to dance is to live." 100,000 first printing; 13-city author tour; simultaneous audiobook. (Oct. 1) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Psychologist Jamison, best known for An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness and Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, now engages life's upbeat side. Aiming to reveal how exuberance fuels creative and scientific endeavors (an understudied area), she offers this concoction of animal temperament studies, music, play, discovery, science, laughter, love, religion, celebration, competition, creativity, and destruction. Many characters and sources are well known-e.g., John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt-but the author indelibly brings to life less familiar names as well (e.g., Wilson Bently on snowflakes). Scientists like James Watson are also given voice, adding an elixir of news to a hearty broth of biography and literature. Jamison's interpretations fit perfectly: "Action and distraction, he knew, will always trump the still" (on P.T. Barnum); "Strong passions, like fire, can civilize or kill" (on war). A major creative contribution to positive psychology, this book belongs in every library. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/04.]-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews