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: 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 [...]
Summary: Lisa Damour’s The Emotional Lives of Teenagers provides a handy crash course for parents and mental health professionals who are seeking to understand and support the teenagers in their lives. Drawing from her career in clinical psychology and contemporary research, Damour lays out the reasons why adolescence is a particularly challenging and special time in a young [...]
Summary: Children of Memory is the third volume in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” series. Tchaikovsky continues to build on the evolutionary concepts and thought experiments from the previous two books, this time taking the story in a mysterious and surprising new direction. When an eclectic crew of interstellar adventurers discovers Imir––a partially-terraformed planet colonized by refugees [...]
Summary: Scott Barry Kaufman and Jordyn H. Feingold’s Choose Growth is a direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In an effort to transform our collective trauma into an opportunity for reflection and posttraumatic growth, Kaufman teamed up with Feingold to expand and operationalize the research from his previous book, Transcend, which upgraded Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs using a [...]
Summary: Elaine N. Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person presents Aron’s theory and research on ”highly sensitive persons” (HSPs). Aron claims that HSPs comprise about 15-20% of the general population, with roughly another 20% being “moderately” sensitive. HSPs tend to “pick up on the subtleties that others miss” and “arrive quickly at the level of arousal past which [they] are [...]
Summary: Paul Conti’s Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic provides a basic introduction to the topic of trauma and summarizes what Conti has learned during his career working with trauma victims. In Part One, Conti defines trauma, breaks down the different types of trauma, and suggests some conceptual frameworks for how to best understand trauma’s effects on individuals and [...]
Summary: Anil Seth’s Being You is a new and groundbreaking examination of the nature, science, and ethics of consciousness. Seth presents three theories to contextualize current research and guide future efforts to explain what consciousness is and how it arises. The first theory is the “Real Problem of Consciousness,” an alternative to the traditional “Hard Problem” and [...]
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 [...]