Best psychology books of 2012
From Adam Phillips to Steven Pinker, experts in several fields have pushed the boundaries in our understanding of the mind
Psychotherapist Adam Phillips muses on our 'unlived' lives in his new book. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Observer
Back in 1890, when the "science of mind" was fresh and new, it captured the imagination of a vast range of thinkers: philosophers, alienists, neurologists, psychologists, as well as the new human or social scientists. The great William James, who named the field and was the first to talk of the "stream of consciousness" of subjective life, also noted in his Principles of Psychology: "Perhaps the greatest breach in nature is the breach from one mind to another."
The passage of 120 years has done little to help us leap that breach or to make the subjective life transparent. But in the wake of a period of rampant individualism, with its noisy excess of desiring, getting, and spending, the scientists of mind, in all their initial broad range, are once more trying. They want to assert that "selfishness" is not what humans are about in genes or teams, and that happiness needs redefinition. Attempting to explain us better to ourselves, they remind us that without other minds, there wouldn't be what only seem to be our own in the first place.
Adam Phillips, that master of paradox and the quotable sentence, is also one of very few British psychoanalyst-philosophers. In Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (Hamish Hamilton £20), he muses on our unlived lives, the ones that shadow us with their lost delights, and wonders whether frustrations may not make us better able to live our pleasures than do seeming satisfactions. Greed, he notes in a parenthesis, is "despair about pleasure".
In The Shrink and the Sage (Icon £9.99) philosopher Julian Baggini and his partner, psychotherapist Antonia Macaro recombine two fields that had grown distant to ponder what might make the good life and breach gaps. Aristotle's "mean" sets the tone. Meanwhile Oliver Burkeman, in The Antidote (Canongate £15), steers us away from the tacky horrors of positive thinking. After a bout of George Bush at the raucous Get Motivated! Seminar in Texas, he travels through the hidden benefits of insecurity to the museum of failure, finally to embrace mortality in Mexico. Somewhere along the way I like to imagine he bumped into Susan Cain, whose Quiet (Viking £14.99) sings the power and delights of introversion in a raucous world.
In Together (Allen Lane £25), the second book in his homo faber trilogy, the ever-rewarding Richard Sennett digs into history and examines the cooperative skills we humans possess. In groups or tribal collectivities, solidarity that insists on everyone's being in agreement won't provide the necessary glue. Sennett wants both to allow complex differences and engender cooperation through a craft of togetherness that includes listening, working and ritual gatherings.
The American trend for long books filled with mountains of data in support of provocative hypotheses continues. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin £12.99), energetically argues that we've grown more civilised and less violent than our prehistoric, certainly pre-Hobbesian, forebears – something I've long wanted to believe but found it hard to while rockets, bombers and drones do their worst.
Jonathan Haidt is another Darwinian, this time a social and cultural psychologist, whose interests in The Righteous Mind (Allen Lane £20) are political, as well. Digging for the genesis and workings of morality in humans, he turns in this adventurous book to tribal life and animal behaviour, as well as the ancients and American politics. The rider on the elephant is his metaphor for the divided human mind, the first being our strategic reasoning; the much larger second all the other mental processes "outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behaviour". It's odd that American psychologists seem to have forgotten that Freud too read Darwin, and so keep having to reinvent the unconscious. Our morality comes from the elephant, is instinctive and tribal, binds and blinds, and easily turns into the moralising that ever makes us "righter" than them. Is it possible to get Democrats and Republicans to breach the gap? I wasn't convinced, but maybe Haidt and Sennett should get together.
In the fascinating Beyond Human Nature (Allen Lane £22), Jesse J Prinz shows how on most of the points on which evolutionary psychologists like to reflect, humans are shaped far more by their culture than by nature. Examining knowledge, language, thinking, feeling and values, Prinz shows that people from different cultures perceive differently, are driven to, and suffer, mental illness in various ways, and find a wide range of mating partners attractive, until globalised values arrive to standardise taste.
And so to love and mating, perhaps the best way to bridge the great gap of separate minds, let alone bodies. If you prefer your wooing with data – on hunter gatherers, voles and the neurohormone oxytocin – then Robin Dunbar's The Science of Love and Betrayal (Faber £12.99) is for you. Alternately, if you want the complexities of love in a family story that comes in bold graphic form and contains a host of psy-knowledge and Winnicottian lore, then Alison Bechdel's comic drama Are You My Mother? (Jonathan Cape £16.99) is pure bliss.
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Best of 2012: 50 notable works of nonfiction
Here are a few books from their list:
AMERICA’S UNWRITTEN CONSTITUTION: The Precedents and Principles We Live By
By Akhil Reed Amar (Basic)
This is a masterful, readable book that constitutes one of the best, most creative treatments of the U.S. Constitution in decades. — Ken Gormley
AUTUMN IN THE HEAVENLY KINGDOM: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
By Stephen R. Platt (Knopf)
Platt’s fresh and important argument refutes the traditional idea that China was unchangeable and not a significant factor in the world’s history in the 19th century. — John Pomfret
THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOE BRAINARD
Edited by Ron Padgett (Library of America)
A superbly engaging bedside book in whichnearly every page is mysterious, inconsequential and fun. — Michael Dirda
CONFRONT AND CONCEAL: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power
By David E. Sanger (Crown)
Sanger’s immensely readable work shows that President Obama has been surprisingly aggressive on national security, mostly behind closed doors. — D.T-R.
CRONKITE
By Douglas Brinkley (Harper)
Brinkley reveals the legendary newscaster as an Odysseus-like figure — a man physically and morally courageous, but full of fears; ambitious for fame, fiercely jealous of rivals — who created around himself an aura of public trust. — Robert MacNeil
DRIFT: The Unmooring of American Military Power
By Rachel Maddow (Crown)
The author urges Congress and voters to become full partners in decisions to go to war and not leave them to their president. — Gordon M. Goldstein
ELSEWHERE: A Memoir
By Richard Russo (Knopf)
Novelist Russo writes candidly of his mother, who inspired and sustained his literary career but also was demanding and manipulative.— Marie Arana
AMERICA’S UNWRITTEN CONSTITUTION: The Precedents and Principles We Live By
By Akhil Reed Amar (Basic)
This is a masterful, readable book that constitutes one of the best, most creative treatments of the U.S. Constitution in decades. — Ken Gormley
AUTUMN IN THE HEAVENLY KINGDOM: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
By Stephen R. Platt (Knopf)
Platt’s fresh and important argument refutes the traditional idea that China was unchangeable and not a significant factor in the world’s history in the 19th century. — John Pomfret
THE BOY KINGS OF TEXAS: A Memoir
By Domingo Martinez (Lyons)
Recounting the author’s tough upbringing in Brownsville, Tex., this finalist for the National Book Award joins a rich body of Mexican American coming-of-age narratives. — Valerie Sayers
THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOE BRAINARD
Edited by Ron Padgett (Library of America)
A superbly engaging bedside book in whichnearly every page is mysterious, inconsequential and fun. — Michael Dirda
CONFRONT AND CONCEAL: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power
By David E. Sanger (Crown)
Sanger’s immensely readable work shows that President Obama has been surprisingly aggressive on national security, mostly behind closed doors. — D.T-R.
CRONKITE
By Douglas Brinkley (Harper)
Brinkley reveals the legendary newscaster as an Odysseus-like figure — a man physically and morally courageous, but full of fears; ambitious for fame, fiercely jealous of rivals — who created around himself an aura of public trust. — Robert MacNeil
DEARIE: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child
By Bob Spitz (Knopf)
A tasty retelling of Child’s privileged (but bland) childhood, her awakening to fine food and her delight in sharing it. — Becky Krystal
DOUBLE CROSS: The True Story of the D-Day Spies
By Ben Macintyre (Crown)
The idiosyncratic British spymasters of World War II were almost Monty Python characters, yet they helped secure the Allied victory. — David Ignatius
DRIFT: The Unmooring of American Military Power
By Rachel Maddow (Crown)
The author urges Congress and voters to become full partners in decisions to go to war and not leave them to their president. — Gordon M. Goldstein
ELSEWHERE: A Memoir
By Richard Russo (Knopf)
Novelist Russo writes candidly of his mother, who inspired and sustained his literary career but also was demanding and manipulative.— Marie Arana
THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH
By Edward O. Wilson (Liveright)
This renowned scientist unflinchingly defines the human condition as largely a product of the tension between the impulse to selfishness and to altruism, individual selection vs. group dynamic. — Colin Woodard
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These are a few books from the Publisher's Weekly list for 2012:Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain (poetry)The 14 stories of this Pulitzer Prize in poetry finalist’s (for Inseminating the Elephant) debut collection, set in the Pacific Northwest, display the poet’s emotional economy alongside raw honesty, haunting understatement, and a sharp wit. Women, damaged and vulnerable, make bad choices again and again, pursue fruitless obsessions, and somehow often come out on top.
Analyzing our "estrangement from nature" in the 20th century, Challenger's moving and lyrical first nonfiction book medi-tates on big picture questions as she travels from a writer's solitary cabin on England's Ding Dong Moor to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, back to the North Yorkshire town of Whitby and on to the tundra of the Arctic.
To the Ends of the Earth: PW Talks with Melanie Challenger
In his typically unflinching and bold manner, the late Hitchens candidly shares his thoughts about his suffering, the etiquette of illness and wellness, and religion in this stark and powerful memoir.
Excerpt: 'Mortality' by Christopher Hitchens
Solomon's own trials of feeling marginalized as gay, dyslexic, and depressive, while still yearning to be a father, frame these af-fecting real tales about bravely facing the cards one's dealt with.Extraordinary Children: PW Talks with Andrew Solomon
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100 Notable Books of 2012
Published: November 27, 2012
Here are a few books from their list (starting with Fiction and Poetry):The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
BLASPHEMY. By Sherman Alexie. (Grove, $27.) The best stories in Alexie’s collection of new and selected works are moving and funny, bringing together the embittered critic and the yearning dreamer.
THE BOOK OF MISCHIEF: New and Selected Stories. By Steve Stern. (Graywolf, $26.) Jewish immigrant lives observed with effusive nostalgia.
COLLECTED POEMS. By Jack Gilbert. (Knopf, $35.) In orderly free verse constructions, Gilbert deals plainly with grief, love, marriage, betrayal and lust.
DEAR LIFE: Stories. By Alice Munro. (Knopf, $26.95.) This volume offers further proof of Munro’s mastery, and shows her striking out in the direction of a new, late style that sums up her whole career.
A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING. By Dave Eggers. (McSweeney’s, $25.) Eggers’s novel is a haunting and supremely readable parable of America in the global economy, a nostalgic lament for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands.Non-Fiction:
BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History. By Florence Williams. (Norton, $25.95.) Williams’s environmental call to arms deplores chemicals in breast milk and the vogue for silicone implants.COMING APART: The State of White America, 1960-2010. By Charles Murray. (Crown Forum, $27.) The author of “The Bell Curve” warns that the white working class has abandoned the “founding virtues.”DARWIN’S GHOSTS: The Secret History of Evolution. By Rebecca Stott. (Spiegel & Grau, $27.) Stott’s lively, original history of evolutionary ideas flows easily across continents and centuries.FAR FROM THE TREE: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. By Andrew Solomon. (Scribner, $37.50.) This passionate and affecting work about what it means to be a parent is based on interviews with families of “exceptional” children.FLAGRANT CONDUCT. The Story of Lawrence v. Texas: How a Bedroom Arrest Decriminalized Gay Americans. By Dale Carpenter. (Norton, $29.95.) Carpenter stirringly describes the 2003 Supreme Court decision that overturned the Texas sodomy law.THE FOLLY OF FOOLS: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. By Robert Trivers. (Basic Books, $28.) An intriguing argument that deceit is a beneficial evolutionary “deep feature” of life.
THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH. By Edward O. Wilson. (Norton, $27.95.) The evolutionary biologist explores the strange kinship between humans and some insects.SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID: Memoirs of an Outsider. By Zakes Mda. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) The South African novelist and playwright absorbingly illuminates his wide, worldly life.SPILLOVER: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. By David Quammen. (Norton, $28.95.) Quammen’s meaty, sprawling book chronicles his globe-trotting scientific adventures and warns against animal microbes spilling over into people.WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL? By Jeanette Winterson. (Grove, $25.) Winterson’s unconventional and winning memoir wrings humor from adversity as it describes her upbringing by a wildly deranged mother.
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This list seems to be mostly fiction (or not - I hate reading in "slide shows" so I stopped after 7 or 8) and it comes from Huffington Post.
Our Editors Select The Best Books Of 2012
Posted: 10/16/2012
It's awards season in the book world, with the National Book Awards in November and The Nobel Prize in Literature announcement. We figured now was as good a time as any to reflect on the books we've read this year (and as book editors, we've read a lot!), and determine which, in our opinion, are the best.
This fall was a monumental season for books, with the releases of Michael Chabon's long-awaited "Telegraph Avenue," Zadie Smith's enigmatic "NW," and J.K. Rowling's first foray into adult realism, "The Casual Vacancy." But somehow, the big-name releases underwhelmed us.
Instead, we were enchanted by writers who took risks: Davy Rothbart's big-hearted memoir moved us, Sheila Heti's intimate and peculiar story reached out to us, and Gillian Flynn's genre-bending thriller kept us up at night. Sure, there are a few stalwarts we'll never grow tired of--how can anyone resist Junot Díaz's sharp tongue, Marilynne Robinson's tender poignancy and Jonathan Franzen's cynicism?--but, for 2012 at least, we applaud the authors, both debut and more seasoned, who strayed from conventions.
Without further ado, here are the Huffington Post Books Editors' picks for the best books of 2012 (so far): follow the little blue link
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From the British Psychological Society (BPS Research)The best psychology books of 2012
It's the season for Christmas book lists and we've trawled through them, looking for the psychology-themed tomes earning a recommendation.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by psychologist Jonathan Haidt - listed by the Sunday Times as one of their favourite thought-provoking books of the year (also chosen by the Guardian as a top psychology book).
In the same Sunday Times category was listed Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain, which also won GoodReads vote for best non-fiction of the year.
In its list of the over-looked non-fiction books of the year Slate highlights The Wisdom of Psychopaths by psychologist Kevin Dutton: a "terrifically entertaining and chilling book".
Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad Doctors of Victorian England by Sarah Wise (Bodley Head, £20) - Sebastian Faulks for the Daily Telegraph recommended it, saying "it is an illuminating look at an area of social history that inspired Wilkie Collins among others".
Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired by Till Roenneberg was chosen by Brain Pickings as one of the best science books of the year.
This year's British Psychological Society book award went to Dorling Kindersley's The Psychology Book: "An innovative and accessible guide designed for readers new to psychology."
In Amazon's list of the best non-fiction books of the year was The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg.
Barnes and Noble listed Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon as one of the best non-fiction books of the year: "This crucial and revelatory book expands our definition of what it is to be human." (also chosen by the NYT as one of the 10 best books of the year).
The Guardian published a list of the best psychology books of the year, highlighting Beyond Human Nature by Jesse J Prinz: "shows how on most of the points on which evolutionary psychologists like to reflect, humans are shaped far more by their culture than by nature."
The Sunday Times chose Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory by psychologist Charles Fernyhough as one of their favourite science books of the year: "a book about memory that is also a memoir".
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust, by John Coates was listed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the year's best science books: "No one is better qualified to analyse the biology of banking than Coates, a trader turned neuroscientist."
Last but not least, James Gleick's The Information won this year's Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books: "tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness."
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Post compiled by Digest editor Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer), whose Rough Guide to Psychology is still available from all good book shops.
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This last list is from The Guardian: their list was chosen by other authors, as well as newspaper staff. It's a long list so here is only a selection.
Best books of the year 2012
From Zadie Smith's new novel to Robert Macfarlane's journeys on foot and memoirs by Edna O'Brien and Salman Rushdie…
Which books have most impressed our writers this year?
Julian Baggini, Author
Tony Wright's Doing Politics (Biteback £12.99) restores hope that serious thought can go on in Westminster. Wright retired as an MP at the last election universally respected by constituents and peers, and this collection of his writings shows how an astute reading of the intellectual traditions of the left provides all that is needed for a relevant, contemporary Labour party. Roger Scruton continued to do the same job for the Conservatives, more or less single-handed, in Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet (Atlantic £22).
Mary Beard, Classicist, author and broadcaster
Some of my favourite books of the year always turn out to be exhibition catalogues. In 2012 my first prize went to the Royal Academy's Johan Zoffany RA, Society Observed (Royal Academy £24.95), edited by Martin Postle. It was a wonderful souvenir of a great show, but also taught me a lot about an artist I fancied I knew quite well – some of it surprisingly raunchy (like the discussion of Zoffany's wonderful hanging condoms). In second place was the British Museum's beautiful Shakespeare: Staging the World (British Museum £25), by Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton. You never knew that Henry V's saddle could be so interesting! Honest.
Alexander McCall Smith, Novelist
Christopher Simon Sykes's Hockney: The Biography (Century £25), which takes us up to 1975, is a marvellous, vivid story. Then there is Ben Macintyre, whose Double Cross: The True Story of The D-Day Spies (Bloomsbury £7.99) is, as one might expect from the author of Agent Zigzag, a triumph.
Owen Jones, Author and political commentator
As well as inflicting misery on millions, Tory governments tend to provoke a new generation of left-wing writers. With what is both a compelling and definitive guide to the rise of the BNP in the 00s, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right (Verso £14.99), Daniel Trilling emerges at the forefront of a new wave of young progressive thinkers.
Sara Wheeler, Travel writer and biographer
A first book by a young Englishwoman impressed me. Suzanne Joinson's A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (Bloomsbury £12.99) consists of two parallel stories, each told from the point of view of a childless female protagonist, one at a shimmering, multi-ethnic Silk Road trading post, the other in contemporary London. From a debutante to a grande dame: Alice Munro's Dear Life (Chatto & Windus £18.99), another dazzling collection of short stories, provincial and universal in equal measure.
Andrew Rawnsley, Chief political commentator, the Observer
I hugely enjoyed Dan Jones on The Plantagenets (HarperPress £25), stonking narrrative history told with pace, wit and scholarship about the bloody dynasty that produced some of England's most brilliant, brutal kings. I thought even my large appetite for accounts of the great conflict of the 20th century might have been sated after so many excellent recent books on the subject, but Antony Beevor proved me wrong with his terrific The Second World War (W&N £25). As we have come to expect from this master, he excels at using eyewitness testimony to illustrate how mankind can be capable of both terrible cruelty and astonishing courage.
Maria Popova, Editor of brainpickings.org
As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-1980 (Hamish Hamilton £18.99), the second volume of Susan Sontag's published diaries, presents a remarkable glimpse of the inner life – conflicted, restless, brimming with conviction – of one of modern history's greatest intellectuals. In Ignorance: How it Drives Science (Oxford £14.99), Columbia biologist Stuart Firestein challenges our relationship with facts and knowledge, making a bold case for new models of science education and research funding rewarding curiosity rather than certitude. Drawing from the City (Tara £22.99) features the stunning illustrations of self-taught Indian folk artist Teju Behan in a tender and aspirational story about woman's empowerment in patriarchal society.
Robert McCrum, Associate editor, the Observer
My big discovery this year was Alison Moore's The Lighthouse (Salt £8.99), a beautifully constructed first novel of haunting subtlety and dark mystery. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, it was probably too slight to be a contender, but Alison Moore must be a name to watch. Salley Vickers is a novelist whose imaginative journey always promises magic and mystery. The Cleaner of Chartres (Viking £16.99) shows her on top form in a rich weave of loss and redemption spiked with Ms Vickers' irrepressible wit.
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