Summary: Scott Barry Kaufman’s Rise Above is about the perils of victim mindset and how we can avoid them. In Part One, Kaufman explores the dynamics of victim mindset, including how people get stuck ruminating about their pasts, how we indulge irrational emotions and cognitive distortions, and how we become overly concerned with self-esteem and […]
Spoiler Warning If you care about spoilers and have managed to avoid learning what happens in The Last of Us, Parts I or II––or in HBO’s TV adaptation––proceed with caution. What follows assumes total familiarity with the plot and does not avoid major spoilers. Introduction: Video Games and Moral Crimes I committed my first digital […]
Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer is the third installment in his Stormlight Archive series. It continues the story of Dalinar, Kaladin, and Shallan, along with an enormous and ever-expanding cast of supporting characters. In Oathbringer, as a new Desolation dawns, Dalinar’s attempt to unite all the nations of Roshar against their common enemy takes center stage, along […]
Summary: Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? is an allegorical tale about how to think about and respond to change. It tells the story of four characters who live in a large Maze and must explore the Maze to find cheese. There are two mice, Sniff and Scurry, and two littlepeople, Hem and Haw. They […]
Summary: Robert Masters’s To Be a Man is a passionate text that challenges men to grow and heal in ways that will generate what Masters calls “true masculine power.” Focusing on the topics of shame, anger, aggression, relational intimacy, and sex, Masters explores the dysfunctional patterns that pervade modern models of masculinity, offering alternative frameworks […]
Summary: Laura van Dernoot Lipsky’s Trauma Stewardship seeks to support helping professionals in their efforts to address and cope with the effects of “secondary” or “vicarious” trauma. Lipsky argues that the “trauma exposure response” often experienced by helping professionals is neither well understood nor properly dealt with by many individuals and organizations. As a result, the helping […]
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 […]