'Buzz': A mother sorts out everyone's ADD

BUZZ: An ADHD Mother's Search for Understanding, Patience, and Comic Relief, by Katherine Ellison. Voice e-book, $13.99.

If you have challenging kids -- and parents may often wonder, is there any other kind? -- you'll probably have a strong reaction to Katherine Ellison's "Buzz." The book is a chronicle of Ellison's efforts to understand and help resolve her teenage son's behavioral problems, and it is by turns helpful and maddening.

Part memoir and part popular science, "Buzz" will either make you nod in empathy or hurl it at the wall. (Be careful: This book is being reissued as an e-book rather than a paperback, and that shattered Kindle will cost you.) Ellison's glibness sometimes undermines her message, but her frankness can be refreshing: "Lucky, blessed, and grateful as I feel about being a mother, I also frequently resent the hell out of how much of my time my kids demand."

Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who decided to turn her son -- "a certifiable problem child," with diagnoses of attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorder -- into her "personal and professional project." She vowed to reorganize her life to focus on helping him and mending their shattered relationship.

But there's a twist: Along the way, Ellison's own attention deficit disorder was diagnosed.

"I want to figure out how to be a better parent. I want to write a graceful, helpful book. I also want to work for Google, the coolest company around," she writes after taking on a consulting gig with the company. During her "year of paying attention," Ellison was also overseeing a house renovation, organizing her son's bar mitzvah, crisscrossing the country researching alternative treatments and juggling freelance assignments. When her sister suggests that perhaps Ellison doesn't have ADD but was simply trying to do too much, Ellison replies, "Maybe I'm trying to do too much because I have ADD."

Therein lies the sticky question at the heart of this book: How do you distinguish between a biological condition and the pressures and anxieties of modern life? To her credit, Ellison makes sorting out this gray area one of her (many) goals. She scours the latest research on attention disorders -- from brain-mapping to neurofeedback and supplements -- and interviews numerous experts. Although Ellison can find no magic bullet, her book offers an instructive, if scattered, guide for parents of "certifiable" problem children as they navigate the "data storm" surrounding attention disorders.