In this penetrating, important book—at once scholarly and highly readable, authoritative and anecdotal—Jeffrey Lieberman introduces us to the strange and frightening world of schizophrenia, charting its history, its treatments, its highly varied manifestations and insidious causes. He writes with compelling optimism about psychiatry’s great leaps forward; explains when, how, and why the antipsychotics work; and allows us to glimpse the future possibility of prevention. He is perhaps the leading authority working on this topic today, and here he makes the complex science he has mastered fully accessible. If someone I know were diagnosed today, this is the volume to which I would immediately turn, and copies of which I’d distribute to the patient’s friends and family. It will spare such people from anguish and perhaps save their lives.