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: 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: 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: Naomi Novik’s The Golden Enclaves is the third and final book in her Scholomance trilogy. Still reeling from the chaos of graduation day, Galadriel and her companions are tossed into a complex tangle of international conflicts threatening to disrupt the lives of magic users everywhere. Through providing aid to compromised enclaves across several continents, they learn [...]
Summary: Naomi Novik’s The Last Graduate is the second book in her Scholomance trilogy. Now in their senior year at the Scholomance, Galadriel and her classmates are generating every bit of mana they can muster and practicing to take on the horde of maleficaria that awaits them on graduation day. As the end of their final term approaches, [...]
Summary: Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education is the first book in her Scholomance trilogy. The book drops readers into a grim fantasy world in which magicians are constantly threatened by “maleficaria,” a ravenous horde of magical monsters eager to devour the mana that each magician carries inside them. Adolescent magicians have a particularly high mortality rate, so [...]
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: William R. Miller and Theresa B. Moyers’s Effective Psychotherapists is a concise and instructive introduction to the particular skills and attitudes that make some therapists more effective than others. In Part One, Miller and Moyers argue that “therapist effects” or “relational factors” that shape the foundational working alliance between therapist and client are at least as [...]
Summary: Richard V. Reeves’s Of Boys and Men takes a hard look at the challenges faced by the modern American male and advocates for structural changes that can help boys and men overcome them. In Part One, Reeves describes what he calls “the male malaise,” how boys and men have fallen behind and become disengaged from school, work, [...]
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 [...]