Books and Literature

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      5 Books on Healing From Trauma

      by

      Neuroscientists, psychologists and other experts share the titles they recommend most.When Gabor Maté was in his 40s and a successful doctor in Vancouver, Canada, he struggled with depression and strained relationships. Picking up “The Drama of the Gifted Child,” by Alice Miller, was the first step to understanding the root of his problems.“A good book gives you a map to yourself,” said Dr. Maté, now a trauma researcher and author of “The Myth of Normal.”While reading Dr. Miller’s book, his experiences started to make sense. “My depression, my self-loathing,” he explained, were a result of early childhood trauma.Trauma is a deeply distressing experience that leaves lasting effects on a person’s thoughts, emotions and behavior. It rewires both the body and mind and shapes overall health. Research shows, however, that the right tools can help us regulate our emotions and rebuild a sense of safety.Many people are hungry for books that explore trauma: Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score” has sold more than three million copies globally and spent more than six years total on the New York Times best-seller list. But there are other works that can help us make sense of negative experiences.The five titles below were recommended by neuroscientists, psychologists and trauma specialists as sources to help you understand and process trauma.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Do You Know the Classic Works That Inspired These Popular Family Movies?

      by

      “The Lion King,” first released as an animated film in 1994, has spawned multiple adaptations and sequels, including Julie Taymor’s 1997 Broadway production and a soundtrack companion album by Beyoncé for the 2019 computer-enhanced movie version. The plot of the story, about a young lion finding his place in the world, has been compared to which play by William Shakespeare? More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Class Matters,’ by Richard D. Kahlenberg

      by

      Richard D. Kahlenberg has long argued for colleges to weigh socioeconomic status to promote diversity. His position is more relevant than ever.CLASS MATTERS: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, by Richard D. KahlenbergIf there is one lesson that centrist Democrats have taken from Donald Trump’s startlingly broad-based victory in November, it is that their party will never return to majority status unless it regains the trust of working-class Americans. Those voters — nonwhite as well as white — rejected the language of race and identity that they associate, fairly or not, with the Democrats. So it’s no surprise that the party has scrambled to develop a “credible working-class message” that will “win them back,” in the words of one super PAC that plans to invest $50 million in the effort.Enter Richard D. Kahlenberg, who has been arguing for virtually his entire adult life that our race-based system of affirmative action pits the white working class against Black people, and aligns the Democratic Party with middle-class or well-to-do beneficiaries of color against Americans who see themselves as the losers in a zero-sum game. His ship finally came in two years ago when the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action violated the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Kahlenberg’s new book, “Class Matters,” is his personal history of the debate, his victory lap and his spirited argument for a liberal politics of class rather than race.That victory lap is hard to begrudge: Kahlenberg writes that he has been laboring in the vineyards since he wrote his senior thesis at Harvard in 1984 on Robert F. Kennedy’s attempt to forge a cross-racial working-class coalition in the 1968 presidential election. Kahlenberg found that Kennedy opposed even mild forms of racial preference in favor of economic programs that would benefit all working-class Americans. I was as surprised to learn this now as Kahlenberg was then, though as a biographer of Hubert Humphrey I know that the devastating loss in 1968 sent Humphrey on the same trajectory.A politics in which elite liberals told ordinary white Americans that they had to make sacrifices — from which elites themselves were largely exempt — in order to compensate for historical injustices was an invitation to disaster.Just before the 1992 election, Kahlenberg notes, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded that the fraction of white voters who felt they had a “personal responsibility” for those injustices was “zero.” Greenberg described affirmative action as a “problem of historic proportions” — as mandatory school desegregation plans had been for an earlier generation of Democrats. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election in part by soft-pedaling race-specific policy solutions; but as president, Kahlenberg concludes, Clinton felt the need to reward civil rights groups by embracing affirmative action.Unlike many conservatives, Kahlenberg accepts the immense salience of race in American life and thus the unfair disadvantages so many students of color face. But the ugly secret of affirmative action, the author argues, is that most Black beneficiaries are middle-class, while many of the white or Asian applicants left out in the cold are working-class students who have done well in school despite significant disadvantages of their own. Are they less deserving?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Tilt,’ by Emma Pattee

      by

      Emma Pattee’s debut novel, “Tilt,” takes place in the 24 hours after “the really big one” devastates the Pacific Northwest.TILT, by Emma PatteeThe most read New Yorker article of 2015 was Kathryn Schulz’s “The Really Big One,” about the potentially devastating Cascadia earthquake that has a 1-in-3 chance of striking the Pacific Northwest within the next 40 years. Taking this very real threat as its knockout premise, Emma Pattee’s debut novel, “Tilt,” is a moving adrenaline rush that also manages to be very funny.When “the really big one” hits, Annie — who narrates the novel as if addressing her unborn child, “Bean” — is 37 weeks pregnant and shopping for a crib at Ikea in Portland, Ore. “Tilt” takes readers through the next 24 hours, with chapters that flash back to fill in the details of Annie’s life. Annie and her husband, Dom, are “star children who forgot to become stars”: Annie, once a promising playwright, supports them as the office manager at a tech company, while Dom auditions for acting roles and picks up shifts at a cafe. Financially strapped, creatively stifled and increasingly distant, Annie and Dom are, “if not on the path to breaking up, at least able to see the path to breaking up from where we’re standing.”But when Annie emerges from the rubble of Ikea, all she can think of is finding Dom. And so she embarks on a journey across the ravaged city. In the summer heat, swollen and dehydrated, Annie trudges past collapsed bridges and burning houses, looted shops and leveled schools. Along the way, she crosses paths with others in their own dire circumstances — most memorably an Ikea employee named Taylor — some of whose fates we will learn, some of whom the narrative will leave behind as Annie presses on.The ingredients in “Tilt” are familiar: a bit of Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” (theater kids in the apocalypse) and a bit of Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind” (cutting social observation in the apocalypse); the acerbic takes on marriage and motherhood reminiscent of Ashley Audrain and Rachel Yoder. Shaken together, these ingredients make for a potent cocktail.I cried more than once reading it. The book’s cover image — a small model bird — comes from an anecdote about Annie’s late mother’s unrealized artistic ambitions that is as heartbreaking as any of the tragic scenes Annie encounters on her journey. I also laughed out loud at many of her dark, unfiltered thoughts, like this one: “I read somewhere that in the case of a natural disaster, you should not look strangers in the eye in case they die later and you’re forced to eat them.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Yoko: The Biography,’ by David Sheff

      by

      David Sheff’s new biography convincingly argues for John Lennon’s widow as a feminist, activist, avant-garde artist and world-class sass.YOKO: The Biography, by David SheffHere’s the thing about Yoko Ono, the artist and widow of the murdered rock star John Lennon (usually not identified in that order), and the subject of David Sheff’s new biography. She is funny — ha-ha, not peculiar.Asked by an interviewer if she’d ever forgive Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman, since Pope John Paul II had visited the jail of his own would-be assassin to offer absolution, Ono replied: “I’m not the pope.”Promoting an ephemeral Museum of Modern Art “exhibit” in 1971, in part to protest the underrepresentation of women and Asian people there, she posed in front with a strategically placed shopping bag so that the building signage read “Museum of Modern (F) Art.” (This was years before “Family Guy”!)Elton John recounted in his memoir, “Me,” how he’d wondered why Ono had sold the herd of Holstein cows she’d bought, trying to invest ethically. “All that mooing,” she told him.For Ono, now 92 and mostly out of the public eye, to have written her own “Me” would have been profoundly out of character. Her art was crowdsourced long before that was a word. “Self-Portrait” was a mirror in a manila envelope that reflected the viewer. She invited audiences to step on a painting, play a form of the child’s game Telephone, climb into a bag, cut off her clothing or otherwise “finish” her visions.Following Lennon’s death in 1980, trusted intimates flouted confidentiality agreements, stole the couple’s memorabilia and wrote tell-alls that Ono fought hard to suppress. (“Best book I’ll ever burn,” their son, Sean, told one particularly egregious betrayer in court.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Twist,’ by Colum McCann

      by

      TWIST, by Colum McCannIt’s a literary conundrum of sorts, how on the surface Colum McCann’s novel “Twist” feels narratively disheveled, with subplots warmed up and abandoned, and loose threads dangling as they do everywhere in life. But the parts are not the sum. McCann, author of six previous novels, including the National Book Award-winning “Let the Great World Spin,” clearly knows what he’s up to — every sentence feels placed with confidence — and through various authorial wiles he has produced a work at once enigmatic and urgent.“Twist” begins with a fairly straightforward narrative. Anthony Fennell, an Irish writer down on his luck, gets an assignment from an online journal to write a piece on the undersea cables that carry the world’s data and the repair teams that patrol the oceans, fixing ruptures. He narrates the saga.Fennell’s editor sends him to Cape Town, where he is to sign on with a repair ship and meet a man named Conway, who is in charge of operations. Waiting in a hotel lobby, Fennell spots Conway on the sidewalk, checking his flip phone. Nothing about the man quite computes. “I certainly thought he would be older, grayer and at the very least have an aura of the smartphone about him,” Fennell thinks. “But here he was, a creature from the unplugged side.” The hook is deftly set.Conway is, and will remain, a mystery: immediate and engaging at first, later aloof and noncommittal — and capable, as we’ll see, of extraordinary actions. Though they’ve just met, he straightaway asks Fennell to come meet his partner, Zanele, a South African-born stage actress. Fennell is wholly taken by her beauty and her obvious bond with Conway. He is now full of conjecture about this man who will preside over his fate for the next weeks.All things change when men are put out to sea. The immensities of sky and ocean are humbling. Shipboard life is a world unto itself, a primal reordering of things, and Fennell is a clear outsider. At the same time, Conway, his only link, has grown distant.Conway charts the path to the first reported break. Though he can be mercurial in his interactions with others, he is completely fixated on his mission. But, as a woman Fennell meets before the trip warns him, “He aspires downward, you’ll see.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Thomas Hoobler, Half of a Prolific Writing Couple, Dies at 82

      by

      He and his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, wrote 103 books, most recently one about presidential love letters, “Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?”Thomas Hoobler, who with his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, wrote 103 books across a vast range of subjects, including young-adult biographies of Margaret Mead, mystery novels set in 18th-century Japan and, most recently, a book about presidential love letters with the attention-grabbing title “Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?,” died on Feb. 22 in Manhattan. He was 82.His wife and their daughter, Ellen Hoobler-Banavadikar, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a stroke. His death was not widely reported at the time.The Hooblers were journeyman writers, contributing to series that will be familiar to any pre-teenager or parent of a pre-teenager, including Penguin’s wildly successful history books known by fans as “Big Heads” for their cartoonish covers, which bore titles like “Where Are the Great Pyramids?” (2015) and “What Was the San Francisco Earthquake?” (2016).The couple also wrote their own series. They were proudest of the 10 “American Family Albums” they wrote for Oxford University Press, starting with “The Chinese American Family Album” in 1994. The series, which drew on diaries, photographs and newspaper clippings to tell the story of the American immigrant experience, won a slew of honors, according to the Hooblers’ website, including three awards from the Parents’ Choice Foundation, a nonprofit guide to children’s media and toys.The Hooblers wrote 10 “American Family Albums” for Oxford University Press, starting with “The Chinese American Family Album” in 1994.Oxford University PressSuch recognition was typical of the Hooblers’ output for young readers, which drew on extensive research but presented history and personalities in compelling, age-appropriate language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      2 Books With Celebrity Cameos

      by

      A memoir of Greenwich Village; an Argentine story collection.Cardi B, climbing into a car in New York City.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersDear readers,To live in this city is sometimes to be subject to random, unheralded encounters with the great and the good: a sitcom star fumbling for her MetroCard; a famously misanthropic novelist, happy as a clam in the stands at a Yankees game; a disgraced former governor looking entirely too unbothered at the bagel store.A true New Yorker, of course, metabolizes these moments and moves on, cool cucumbers in the face of all but the most outrageous disruptions (a professional sports rival, maybe, or an actual Beatle). Still, I never get tired of the low-wattage zing those run-ins can add to a routine and colorless day, like finding a flamingo on the subway.In literature, as in life, a clever writer can do the same, taking real historical figures of some renown — the kind whose main-character energy usually fills a room — and weaving them neatly into someone else’s story.Though they hail from wildly different genres, identities and points of view, both books here approach their famous-person cameos with satisfying restraint: just a few flamingo feathers, judiciously used.—LeahWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More