[close] Deirdre Barrett doesn't use a gold watch and a cape, but other than that, her daily routine at Harvard Medical School is right out of a carnival sideshow. She puts people into trances, suggests how they might overcome or think differently about their problems, and snaps them back out again. With some people, if her word is to be believed, it works quite dramatically: witness the chronic asthmatic, addicted to smoking, who quit the weed--permanently--after a single session with Dr. Barrett. But, as she admits, not everyone is so lucky. Some people are much easier to hypnotize than others, and even those who go glassy-eyed quite readily don't always end up cured. The range of ailments that hypnotic suggestion can sometimes help, meanwhile, is as broad as their causal stories are obscure. To Barrett's credit, The Pregnant Man isn't much interested in causal theories, preferring to stick close to the details of particular case histories. There are seven of those stories here--and that format, plus the title, make comparisons to Oliver Sacks inevitable. While she writes clearly and engagingly, Barrett doesn't quite match up to Sacks's limpid brilliance and manic erudition. Nevertheless, the subject matter is interesting, and her treatment of it informative. --Richard Farr [close]