Percival Everett’s James invites readers to explore a bold new retelling of Mark Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Written from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave who accompanies Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River, James examines the ethics and trauma of antebellum American slavery with a literary brute force that defies its source material. This is […]
Summary: Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is a treasure trove of humanistic wisdom. Part One describes Frankl’s experiences in several concentration camps during World War II, including the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. As a gifted psychiatrist who had already begun to formulate his own flavor of existential therapy, Frankl entered the camps as both an unwilling […]
Summary: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a masterful and urgently important work of nonfiction. It tells the story of how, starting in the early 2010s, the “phone-based childhood” began to radically transform the lives of young people around the world. Haidt calls this “The Great Rewiring of Childhood”––an event which he identifies as the primary cause […]
Summary: Richard C. Schwartz’s You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For is a guide for applying Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of psychotherapy to intimate relationships. IFS posits that all people have a multiplicity of subpersonalities called “parts,” each of which has its own perspectives, beliefs, needs, goals, and special place in a person’s “internal family […]
Summary: Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying presents a Tibetan Buddhist’s views on life, death, and the ways these states are interconnected in Buddhist philosophy. Sogyal Rinpoche describes his vision of how to live well, how to prepare for one’s inevitable death, and how to undertake the spiritual process of rebirth. The book also provides guidance […]
Summary: Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz’s The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog is a harrowing yet hopeful examination of childhood trauma and its consequences. Presented as a series of real-life clinical narratives backed by scientific research, Perry and Szalavitz tell the story of how Perry learned to care for some of the least fortunate […]
Summary: Joe Abercrombie’s Before They Are Hanged is the middle book in The First Law Trilogy. As Collem West enters a bitter war in the north for the Union’s holdings in Angland, Sand dan Glokta is sent to the southern port of Dagoska to root out a conspiracy and coordinate the city’s defense against the Gurkish Emperor’s […]
Summary: The purpose of David Brooks’s How to Know a Person is to help readers learn to become “Illuminators,” which he defines as folks who “have a persistent curiosity about other people” and are experts in “the craft of understanding others” (13). In service of this goal, Brooks explores his personal history, the life stories of other […]
Summary: The Blade Itself is the seductive and brutal opening act of Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law Trilogy. Set in a vast fantasy world of kingdoms vying for power in an ever-shifting geopolitical landscape, Abercrombie introduces a host of characters from different regions who appear to have nothing in common. He then proceeds to slowly draw them together, […]
Summary: Stories of Your Life and Others is the first collection of short stories by Ted Chiang, a man who will surely be remembered as one of this era’s finest writers. Ranging from reimagined biblical fables to ethical examinations of near-future technology, Stories contains a batch of bizarre narratives brimming with emotional poignancy and intellectual depth. With […]