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 [...]
I belong to the tiny fraction of science fiction enthusiasts who didn’t read Andy Weir’s phenomenally-successful breakout novel, The Martian. For whatever reason, it just didn’t appeal to me, although I enjoyed the film adaptation. But when my wife, friends, and favorite podcasters started gushing about Project Hail Mary, I decided it was time to send myself rocketing into Weir’s geeky [...]
While exploring my new career goal of entering the mental health profession, I recently met a LCSW in my community who offers neurofeedback as a supplement to other therapeutic services. Eager to share her enthusiasm for this technique, she generously gifted me a copy of Jim Robbins’s A Symphony in the Brain. My honest first impression was [...]
I have spent the last two months going through the approval process to volunteer at my local hospice center. As a supplement to the excellent training I’ve received, I thought Atul Gawande‘s Being Mortal would be a useful companion as I learn to support dying people and their loved ones. As a surgeon, public health expert, and accomplished [...]
“The past has always interested me for use in the present.” So wrote the aging Harry S. Truman in a 1954 letter to Dean Acheson, his former Secretary of State and dear friend. This observation is reason enough to investigate Truman’s life, a life that still echoes in our modern age. But the reason I picked [...]
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 [...]
When Ezra Klein says something like, “this is the most important book I read this year,” there’s little question as to what I’ll do next. That’s how Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future made its way into my life, and boy am I glad it did! This remarkable, brilliant, and wildly useful book is one [...]
Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight was the perfect book to wrap up a tough and tumultuous year. This short, dazzling novel is a mournful but energetic meditation on humanity’s struggle to find meaning and connection in a vast and threat-strewn universe. Brooks-Dalton’s narrative toggles back and forth between two plot threads, both set against the ominous backdrop [...]
When I decided to pursue a career in counseling, a mentor recommended Carl Rogers as one of the key historical figures in the development of modern psychotherapy. On Becoming a Person is a collection of essays originally published between 1951 and 1961, each presenting a portion of Rogers’s insights from over thirty years of counseling and psychological [...]
It feels odd to call Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World a ”fun” read, but fun is a whole lot of what I had while reading it. In this riveting and extremely grim science fiction thriller, the classic detective novel gets a time travel twist. Sweterlitsch’s imagination demonstrates impressive nuance and scope, and his prose slices the mind like [...]