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Tag: nonfiction

Reply to Rilke

My Dear and Honoured Rilke, I have received your letters We all did–– Joyce’s “general postoffice of human life” was Not too late After all Your letters, first posted Then unposted–– Wash us clean across the generations Bring us the quiet and careful wisdom You sought in Solitude Criticism won’t bring us near to art [...]

SNQ: Sarah Jaquette Ray’s “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety”

Summary: Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety isn’t a book about how to solve the climate crisis. Rather, it’s about how to cultivate a mature, compassionate, and resilient mindset that will allow climate activists to pursue climate justice in a healthy and sustainable fashion. Ray presents a series of lessons about the psychological challenges [...]

SNQ: Paul Conti’s “Trauma”

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 [...]

SNQ: Warren Farrell and John Gray’s “The Boy Crisis”

Summary: Warren Farrell and John Gray’s The Boy Crisis examines how and why boys and men are struggling to survive and thrive in modern life, and seeks to provide a preliminary blueprint for how to reverse this trend. In Part One, Farrell lays out the statistical evidence for the problem, demonstrating how boys and men are failing [...]

SNQ: bell hooks’s “The Will to Change”

Summary: bell hook’s The Will to Change is a work of feminist philosophy that seeks to articulate and subvert the patriarchal constraints that make it difficult for men to give and receive love. “Masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their [...]

SNQ: Amanda Ripley’s “High Conflict”

Summary: Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict examines how individuals and groups get stuck in self-perpetuating and mutually-destructive conflicts, as well as how we can pull ourselves out of them. Ripley defines “high conflict” as “what happens when conflict clarifies into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them” (4). Ripley claims that high conflict is “the invisible [...]

SNQ: Francis Weller’s “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”

Summary: Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow is a heartfelt book about how grief work is understood and practiced through what Weller calls “soul-centered psychotherapy.” Weller suggests that the act of living calls each person to “take up an apprenticeship with sorrow” that allows us to acknowledge the pervasive presence of grief in human life, including [...]

SNQ: Anil Seth’s “Being You”

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 [...]

SNQ: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain”

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 [...]

SNQ: Katherine D. Kinzler’s “How You Say It”

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 [...]