Summary: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is an exceptionally lucid and commendable contribution to popular neuroscience. In this series of concise, highly-accessible essays, Barrett synthesizes a huge field of academic knowledge in a fashion that any literate person can enjoy and benefit from. Her central thesis is that the brain is […]
Summary: Richard Powers’s Bewilderment is a novel narrated by single father, Theo, who is trying to care for his young son, Robin. Theo is an academic astrobiologist who constructs computer models of how life could evolve on distant exoplanets; he is also a widower whose wife died in a tragic accident. Robin is a troubled child with […]
Summary: Katherine D. Kinzler’s How You Say It is a book about how our ways of speaking influence our internal, social, and political experiences. Kinzler argues that all people have “language identities” that typically go unacknowledged, and seeks to highlight the importance of such identities in determining various life outcomes. Some sections of the book focus on […]
Summary: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a fantasy book in which the titular character attempts to understand the fundamental nature of the “House” he inhabits. The House is a seemingly-endless chain of statue-filled Halls rising out of an ocean. As Piranesi learns more about the House and encounters other characters within its labyrinthine structure, he becomes increasingly skeptical […]
Summary: Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise is an exquisitely-crafted and emotionally-gripping novel that covers a huge swath of thematic, historical, and futuristic ground. The story is told in three Books, each of which is loosely connected through the recurrence of certain character names and relationship dynamics that inhabit a single home in Washington Square, New York City. Book […]
There are times when I feel utterly incapable of expressing my appreciation and admiration for a particular book. This is the case with Perhaps the Stars, Ada Palmer’s magnificent conclusion to her Terra Ignota Quartet. Please know, dear reader, that even if you read this entire review, and my reviews of the other three Terra Ignota books (Book 1, […]
Anyone who turns their attention to the world of modern psychotherapy will quickly start finding references to Gabor Maté all over the place. He has made a special contribution to how mental health professionals approach trauma, addiction, and––as his book Scattered Minds demonstrates––attention deficit disorder (ADD). Like many others before me, I was excited to explore Maté’s […]
Lots of writers use science fiction as an imaginary playground for suggesting ways that artificial intelligence might reshape human experience and civilization. Few, however, are ambitious enough to devote an entire novel to exploring the internal, conscious perspective of an AI living in a human-dominated world. For this alone, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun deserves our […]
Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score was pitched to me by several people as the best book for a crash course in trauma research and modern treatments. It did not disappoint. This impressive summary of discoveries and lessons from van der Kolk’s long career is an essential text for anyone looking to enter the […]
I have very little to say about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It is an absolute masterpiece. The writing, the characters, the story––they’re all superb and blend together perfectly. The book is bursting with poignant insights about the nature of freedom, suffering, racism, family, memory, trauma, healing, humanism, and much more. It’s also terrifying and punishing, so be […]