Offering multiple perspectives from many fields of human inquiry that may move all of us toward a more integrated understanding of who we are as conscious beings.
The uncut interview of Stephen Colbert's visit to the Google New York offices. America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't is more of a coffee-table book, with large color pictures, and chapter photos that require the use of included 3-D glasses. It falls somewhere between I Am America and the Daily Show faux-textbooks America (The Book) and Earth (The Book), which used that organizing principle to their advantage. The premise follows the many apocalyptic views of the past four years, claiming America has gone off the rails and completely lost its way, and that only this book offers the true path to restore America's greatness. Which was never really gone, because it's America. The best idea America Again mocks is the one contained in its title. In particular, it skewers Newt Gingrich's 2011 book A Nation Like No Other, which claimed, "America's exceptional greatness is not based on that fact that we are the most powerful, most prosperous—and most generous—nation on earth. Rather, those things are the result of American Exceptionalism." That is one preposterously arrogant whopper, which America Again exploits as an illogical chicken/egg position. The subtle difference between a beneficial amount of pride and the unchecked belief in exceptionalism is ripe for mockery. Stephen Colbert has been playing Stephen T. Colbert since 2005. In those seven years, he's built an impressive mythology to his character, a funhouse mirror held up to shame all other egomaniacal pundits for their hubris. But while the shtick is still reliably funny on television, it doesn't translate as well into print, because a book doesn't have television's immediacy. There's no Super PAC plotline, just a bunch of chapters that respond to issues a bit too late. Colbert and his staff are still extraordinarily funny, but in reaching for a middle-of-the-road coffee table humor book, America Again finds the limits of their comedic talent. Hosted by Eric Schmidt Directed by Lee Stimmel
After yesterday's horrific killings in Connecticut, Open Culture re-posted the Michael Moore documentary, Bowling for Columbine, which is freely available on YouTube. In the years since that event, mass killings have become more common and even more troubling for the simple reason that we seem to learn nothing from these events. The gun lobby has succeeded in not only preventing more regulation of gun sales, but in many states, like Arizona, gun laws become more and more relaxed - to the point that we are a state that does not require ANY training or permits to carry a concealed weapon.
Bowling for Columbine Revisited December 14th, 2012 In April 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 students and one teacher in Columbine, Colorado, while injuring 21 others. Michael Moore documented the tragedy in his 2002 film, Bowling for Columbine, which sits on YouTube, available for everyone to see. It’s heartbreaking to think that a decade later, students are no safer at their schools. If anything, gun control has slackened during the intervening years (thanks partly to the Supreme Court) and mass murders have become more commonplace, if not a monthly occurrence. 12 were killed and 52 injured in Aurora, CO in July. 10 killed in a Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin this August. Five gunned down at Accent Signage Systems in Minnesota in October. Two shot dead at a mall in Portland, Oregon earlier this week. And now 20 youngsters and seven adults killed at an elementary school today in Connecticut. We’ve reached the point where it has become an exceptional American pathology and too much to bear. (If you’re counting, we’ve had 27 mass murders since Columbine, and exponentially more gun-related deaths than any other country in the developed world.) I sincerely hope this isn’t another instance where we breathlessly express outrage for a week, then turn back to the Kardashians, until the next shooting happens in February at best. Public spaces should be safe, schools all the more so. (Let’s not forget Virginia Tech, which left us with another 32 students dead.) It’s time to take some action. And it’s time for our leaders to stop worrying about lobbies and finally lead.
Rishidev Chaudhuri - at 3 Quarks Daily - wrote this interesting look at the legacy of Carl Gustav Jung in light of his contribution in the field of active imagination, a technique used by many therapists who likely do not know it comes from the Analytical Psychology of Jung (although many of the world's religions contain practices that employ the imagination). Anyway, this is a bit of a tribute in that it values the hope for transformation inherent in Jung's somewhat idealized conception of human being.
In many ways, Jung has aged worse than Papa Freud. His world now seems quaint and naïve in its lack of suspicion and irony, in its insistence on treating symbols as universal, in its belief that all peoples are telling the same stories and meaning much the same things, albeit with slightly different flourishes. And his view of the self (part romantic, part enthusiastic humanist) as the mediator between the everyday world and a trans-personal inner world of archetypes is foreign to us, with our unstable selves that are constantly emerging from, being reproduced by and disappearing into the particular contextual forces that surround us. And even the ultimate benevolence of the collective unconscious (so that in the last instance the archetypes are leading us towards meaning and a more complete self) can seem excessively optimistic to us, used to uncaring worlds and unconsciousnesses that are actively trying to strangle us.
And yet there is much grandeur and richness in his world. Few thinkers have given such a central place to creativity and the imaginative life. And his pantheon of symbols, at their best, allow us a polytheism of the world and of the self, allowing us to honor ambiguity, allowing a personality to speak through a multitude of voices and in a multitude of ways, and permitting a playful approach to symbols that enriches the world. His is a worldview extraordinarily sympathetic to meaning-making and narrative-construction, to framing the world in terms of journey and discovery and the reenchantment of life, which is a useful contrast for us, who so often seem to oscillate between attempting to master a world of ever better understood and yet more indifferent matter and the paralysis that comes with the recognition of the contingency of meaning and of the opacity of the selves we cobble together. And Jungian thought has a friendliness and openness to chance and coincidence and the possibilities they allow, made palatable to the rational mind by telling us that it is simply the unconscious expressing itself; that when we flip over a tarot card or open the I Ching to plan for the future we are expanding the space of possibility and that what we find is not random but is allowing a space for the unconscious to speak. And in doing so it allows for the irrational and the differently rational to sweep through and enchant us in their passing.
Active Imagination is a Jungian practice that embodies this richness and openness to symbolic possibility. It's a form of imaginative storytelling used to enter into a dialogue with the unconscious. You center a session around an initial image or figure (often from a dream or myth) and then leave yourself open to how it evolves, and to the related images and figures that drift into consciousness. A session might start with you shutting your eyes (or not), and waiting for a mental image to appear. Perhaps you see yourself walking in a forest. And then you let it unfold, so that perhaps you follow a winding path between the trees, and in the distance you see a hunched figure, and you follow and you try to get closer but the figure keep shuffling away, and you see it turn off the path and enter a house, and you follow it into the house, and it turns out to be an old woman who has laid out a plate of bread and cheese for you. And you start to talk to her. And so on and so forth. It's a meditative process, one where you bracket out the discursive mind and try to simply let yourself be lead along by your imaginings. It's a bit like an interactive process of free association, but you don't just let yourself jump from subject to subject; for example, if you suddenly get distracted by what you plan to have for breakfast, you'd let that go and bring yourself back to the fantasy. As a practice it's actively creative and not just a “quiet-watching” meditative practice.
Another possible way of letting this process unfold is to find a figure or an object that has been in your mind (from a dream, from real life, from a painting, from a tarot card), and start a conversation with it. You say your piece, let the figure says its piece (which you imaginatively fill in without really thinking about it) and so on, back and forth. This can be done in writing (rather like automatic writing), or as an imagined mental conversation. It takes a few tries to get the hang of, but it's a fascinating process. And, of course, you can have dialogues between any number of symbols and figures.
A third approach, not quite Active Imagination but similar, is to consult some semi-random oracle for insight (like tarot cards, or the I Ching, or randomly open up a book at some page and treat what is on that page as guidance), and then try to implement that advice in your life. Again, the idea is that what you find is not random, but is read through your unconscious and semi-conscious preoccupations and needs, and that, at the very least, it will lead you in new and creative directions.
Active imagination is easily ported to other spheres and to artistic practice; for example, you could have these dialogues and tell these stories in paint. It seems to work especially well in movement, as in the odd but compelling body of practice called Authentic Movement, which is halfway between a detached movement meditation and a choreography exercise. In a typical setting, it's performed by a group of people who break up into two. Half the group sits in a circle around the other half and silently witnesses what they do, attempting to be present and non-judgmental. The other half sit, lie and stand inside the circle and then wait until they feel the need to move. And then they move, in the ways that seem natural, but trying to bracket out planning and scripts and just to follow urges, either physical or imaginative. It's a surprisingly productive way of tapping into creative movement possibilities. The initial fear, of course, is that you'll have no interesting ways to move (much like worrying that, if you do Active Imagination, you'll have nothing interesting to imagine), and this fear is enhanced by the presence of the audience. But wait through this fear and permit yourself to move in boring ways and then you start to move in interesting ways: you find interesting movement textures that seem natural; you find interesting imaginative journeys that you lead yourself on. Like Active Imagination, Authentic Movement aims to not be goal directed. I remember a series of sessions where I lay down and took a nap for a half hour or so. Afterwards, I felt like a fraud and in some ways I was, but this was irrelevant. In the following session, I remember waking and stumbling to my feet, my body feeling like that of a wobbly child, and I remember stepping and feeling my weight and relearning how to balance and to walk. It was a simple set of movements, but I find that I often think of that particular texture, both tentative and trusting, when I'm walking about the everyday world and it always subtly shifts the way I experience walking.
Of course it would be foolish for me to prescribe a general approach to these practices or a general way that we should understand the symbols and stories that emerge. At one point in my life, I believed that they represented deep universal truths and that I was excavating my true and authentic inner self. For the usual variety of reasons, I don't think this any more and I'm broadly suspicious of true and authentic selves, and of interiority and excavation as guiding metaphors. But a self that is not pre-given is a self that can be created, even if most of the productive forces are obscure and perhaps sinister, and I still find these practices very compelling in their creative potential and their playfulness. The symbols and archetypes and the movements and the stories all allow for a more expansive and creative self, and seem to open up new possibilities, and the meanings they allow are still valuable even if they are no longer unconditioned or universal. And still, sometimes, when I'm feeling romantic or naively optimistic, they allow me to think that maybe after all there is some transcendent self-discovery awaiting and maybe the universe is conspiring on our behalf and maybe we stumble upon that conspiracy in the midst of creative play.
Kind of like skateboarding without the skateboard, parkour is a physical art form in which practitioners, run, jump, twist and flip off the landscapes around them. In this video trailer for TEDxYouth@Alexandria, several adventurous young TEDx’ers backflip their way through the Egyptian city, spreading the power of “x” as they show off their parkour maneuvers.
Broadcast: Sunday 9 December 2012 James Doty emerged from a disadvantaged background in the United States to become a neurosurgeon, an entrepreneur and a philanthropist—only to let his fortune go and dedicate his professional life to the scientific study of compassion and altruism.
Professor James Doty, Professor of Neurosurgery, Founder and Director of the Centre for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University
Novelist Sebastian Faulks has a new book out, A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts, which offers five seemingly different characters from different times, but Faulks suggests they are connected by theme. In various ways, the characters all deal with issues of identity and selfhood. Sounds interesting.
A young intelligence officer during the Second World War survives life in a Nazi concentration camp. A music producer in the 1970s falls in love with a young bohemian singer who breaks his heart. A lonely Italian neuroscientist makes a revolutionary discovery: Humans have no souls. These are some of the stories Sebastian Faulks weaves together in his latest novel, A Possible Life. "The five parts of the novel connect in certain quite mechanical ways," with occasional characters and locales recurring throughout the stories, Faulks tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "The more important, the more interesting way I see it fitting together is that all the five sections of the novel are variations on a theme." Though the parts of the story are quite different, Faulks says he'd like readers to think of the book "rather as they might [be] going to hear a symphony, and when you come back out of having heard Mozart's Fifth, I don't think you say, 'I just heard four interesting pieces of music.' The book begins with Geoffrey, a clean-cut young Englishman, rather innocent, on the eve of the Second World War. "He's not a very good soldier, gets essentially kicked off his regular infantry position and ends up joining special forces in France, so he's a kind of spy," Faulks says. Taken prisoner, Geoffrey winds up in a concentration camp, where he must deal with the person he's becoming under the terrible circumstances — and the person he becomes after the war. "The change that takes place in him after a period of years enables him to survive," Faulks continues. "So in this first section of the novel, I'm setting up the idea that the self, and our idea of ourselves as individual human beings, is not quite as clear cut as we think, and that we can become different people in our own lives as they go along." The stories jump back and forth in time — one even takes place in the near future, in an Italy ravaged by global recession. "The reason this section had to be set in the future is ... I wanted somebody to have discovered what it is about the human brain that makes us human, that gives us this extraordinary gift of self-awareness," Faulks says. But today's technology isn't up to that challenge, "so it had to be set 30 years ago into the future." But Elena, the neuroscientist who cracks the brain's code, discovers that it doesn't make life any easier. "All the normal kind of emotional, romantic, family and daily problems persist."
Novelist Sebastian Faulks, a former journalist, is the author of Birdsong, A Week in December, and Pistache, among others. Muir Vidler/Courtesy of Henry Holt and Co.
All of the characters in A Possible Life "struggle with the idea of selfhood, and who they are and identity," Faulks says — though not all of them come at the issue through science, as does Elena. Jeanne, whose story follows Elena's, is an illiterate peasant woman in 1820s France. "She is also very religious, and I must say that these big philosophical questions about death, and who we are, and is the self really something that exists or is it just a delusion, don't really apply so much for people who do have a strong religious faith." Faulks describes a passage in Jeanne's story where a more educated young man tells her that someday, science will explain how her thoughts work. "And she looks at him and says, 'What on earth would be the point of that?' because to her these are not significant issues." And while it may be tempting to say that Jeanne, with her simple faith, is happier than the young man, Faulks says that's not quite right. "Otherwise we're really saying that everything, all human knowledge and education and things that we've acquired, act against our own interests ... and that's not really true, is it?" Could all of these characters have had very different lives from the ones Faulks described? He says yes. "You take the path marked A, and you could very easily have taken the path marked B, and you look back and sometimes you regret it, and sometimes you bless your good fortune or your good sense, but certainly we all have within us the potential to live in a hugely different way. And how happy you can make yourself, I think, a lot depends on how much you beat yourself up about that. "I'm not trying to preach in this book," he adds. "It's a book in which I really hope the reader can come, and they can inhabit the space ... It's me saying, here are five linked pieces of music. It should send you out of the concert hall with tears in your eyes, but feeling, I hope, a little bit uplifted."
From NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge, this is an entertaining survey of the current views on higher consciousness from some of the big names in the field, including Richard Davidson, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, Susan Blackmore, Christof Koch, and Karen Armstrong.
Suppose neuroscientists map the billions of neural circuits in the human brain....are we any closer to cracking the great existential mysteries - like meaning, purpose or happiness? Scientists, contemplatives and religious thinkers are now exploring the connections between neuroscience and contemplative practice, and creating a new science of mindfulness. RELATED LINK(S): Steve's Atlantic interview with Christof Koch: Part One Steve's Atlantic interview with Christof Koch: Part Two
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is a leading expert on the science of mindfulness. He's teamed up with the Dalai Lama to put Buddhist monks in brain scanners, and he's developing a new scientific model for studying emotion. You can also listen to the EXTENDED interview, and read the extended transcript.
JUSTIN BARRETT ON BORN BELIEVERS Listen Download Transcript Psychologist Justin Barett thinks most children have a natural aptitude for religious belief. He says it's not surprising that so many people believe in spirits or supernatural beings.
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KAREN ARMSTRONG ON THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE Listen Download Transcript Karen Armstrong is one of the world's best-known writers on religion, but her own spiritual path hasn't been easy. She tells us why she joined a convent and then left - and how she later came to appreciate religious texts.
Transcript Could the Internet feel happy or depressed? That's a distinct possibility, says renowned neuroscientist Christof Koch. He talks about computer consciousness, God, and the frontiers of brain science. You can also listen to the EXTENDED interview, and read the extended transcript.
Transcript Susan Blackmore is a British psychologist who's written books on consciousness, memes and Zen Buddhism. She says her daily practice of meditation has revealed truths that have eluded the scientific study of consciousness. You can also listen to the EXTENDED interview, and read the extended transcript.
America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't is more of a coffee-table book, with large color pictures, and chapter photos that require the use of included 3-D glasses. It falls somewhere between I Am America and the Daily Show faux-textbooks America (The Book) and Earth (The Book), which used that organizing principle to their advantage. The premise follows the many apocalyptic views of the past four years, claiming America has gone off the rails and completely lost its way, and that only this book offers the true path to restore America's greatness. Which was never really gone, because it's America. The best idea America Again mocks is the one contained in its title. In particular, it skewers Newt Gingrich's 2011 book A Nation Like No Other, which claimed, "America's exceptional greatness is not based on that fact that we are the most powerful, most prosperous—and most generous—nation on earth. Rather, those things are the result of American Exceptionalism." That is one preposterously arrogant whopper, which America Again exploits as an illogical chicken/egg position. The subtle difference between a beneficial amount of pride and the unchecked belief in exceptionalism is ripe for mockery. Stephen Colbert has been playing Stephen T. Colbert since 2005. In those seven years, he's built an impressive mythology to his character, a funhouse mirror held up to shame all other egomaniacal pundits for their hubris. But while the shtick is still reliably funny on television, it doesn't translate as well into print, because a book doesn't have television's immediacy. There's no Super PAC plotline, just a bunch of chapters that respond to issues a bit too late. Colbert and his staff are still extraordinarily funny, but in reaching for a middle-of-the-road coffee table humor book, America Again finds the limits of their comedic talent.
Dr. Holly Dunsworth explains how your genome is showing, and she explores why human origins is getting personal. First we glimpsed our reflected faces, then our cells in microscopes, then our bodies in photographs, and then our bones in x-rays. Now we can see inside our genomes to find things like earwax alleles, Parkinson's disease risk, warfarin response risk, ancient maternal haplogroups, and even Neanderthal genes. But personal genomics isn't just high-tech navel-gazing; it's a powerful tool for grasping human evolutionary biology. Once the technology becomes good enough and the price comes down far enough nearly everyone will have access to this high-resolution fascination with ourselves, our origins, and our evolution. As it enters the mainstream, personal genomics conjures intriguing new questions about its potential impact on our species, like, how will it change public perception of the science of human evolution and humanity's place in nature? How will it affect personal identities and species perspectives? How will it shape conceptions of our future evolution?
~ Dr. Holly Dunsworth is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rhode Island. A Leakey Foundation Grantee, she co-directs survey and excavation at the early Miocene primate sites on Rusinga Island, Kenya with an aim at reconstructing the habitats and paleoenvironments of the early hominoid Proconsul. Her other research considers the energetic throughput of zoo apes and as well as the metabolic restrictions on primate reproduction, with a focus on testing the "obstetrical dilemma" hypothesis for hominin evolution.
Dr. Dunsworth posts original classroom activities, teacher resources, and her analyses of current events in human evolutionary sciences on her award winning blog, The Mermaid's Tale. There she strives to overturn misconceptions about, and cultural barriers to, understanding human evolution.
Here are several lists for the Best Books of 2012, from a wide diversity of sources, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, Esquire, and BPS Research.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
Here are a few books from their list (starting with Fiction and Poetry):
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.
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.
THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH.By Edward O. Wilson. (Norton, $27.95.) The evolutionary biologist explores the strange kinship between humans and some insects.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Paul Bloom
