This week, the Centers for Disease Control released a report that said that suicide rates in the United States have risen nearly 30% since 1999. With the issue of mental health in the news so frequently lately, I am looking for guidance from Parker Palmer’s essays on depression. He describes … Read More
Category: non-fiction
“The failure was flooded with genius.”
This book focuses on one remarkable ten-month period when some of the most interesting people in the world – Sigmund Freud, Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Gustav Klimt – lived in Vienna, which had one of the highest suicide rates in Europe. Why did so many people in this … Read More
“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.”
Who would you like to begin your summer with? This year, I choose Henry David Thoreau. His essay “Walking” celebrates the art of meandering, sauntering and getting lost in fields and woods. He is drawn to the forest, the meadow and “the night in which the corn grows.” He … Read More
“I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak – to be company.”
“I want to be alone, but not too alone.”
I disagree with the description on the back of this book, which says that one of Jonathan Franzen’s “essential themes” is “the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America.” Rather, it seems to me that in every one of these essays, the narrator discovers that he’s not alone … Read More
“All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.”
This is how Laura Ingalls Wilder described her Little House books in a speech in 1937. As it turns out, the “whole truth” was stranger than fiction in many ways. In Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser tells a story that is much darker than … Read More
“You’re not going to be able to deal with this problem alone.”
The most radical idea in Johann Hari’s Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions is that treatment for depression shouldn’t focus on medication only. Because depression has three kinds of causes – biological, psychological and social – treatment plans should include multiple responses and … Read More
“I can still see the frame of the arch between the living room and the hall bending maniacally the closer I approached.”
Hisham Matar, author of The Return, continues his description of the year after his father had been kidnapped by Qaddafi’s supporters, when the family didn’t know whether the father was dead or alive. “Any repetitive movement increased my heartbeat. Looking out of the window, I had to make … Read More
“It should not simplify.”
Up and down and up again – the changes in the temperature this spring have caught me off balance more than once. Uncertain times call for poetry, I think, and for contemplating the purpose of poetry. Seamus Heaney’s book The Redress of Poetry shows how poetry should repair or … Read More
“Students who have experienced trauma and stress are not a small subpopulation of students.”
This book, like last week’s book, discusses “Adverse Childhood Experiences,” which is a set of 10 questions that assess the level of trauma kids experience. These questions focus on exposure to mental illness, addiction, abandonment, hunger, physical abuse or danger, sexual assault, and imprisonment. Studies have found that about a … Read More
“Professor Andrew Skull of Princeton has said attributing depression to low serotonin is ‘deeply misleading and unscientific.’”
Every once in a while, a book touches a nerve. This one certainly did when a British newspaper published excerpts from Lost Connections in an article titled “Is everything you think you know about depression wrong?” A neuroscientist – who hadn’t read the book – wrote a scathing review, … Read More
“Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think . . .”
It’s easy to recognize “bad” writing, but hard to identify the cause of bad writing. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker argues that the problem starts when writers make incorrect assumptions about their readers’ knowledge and vocabulary. Writers who are experts, for example, can be so familiar with their topics that … Read More
“This is the most thrilling time in the history of genealogy. Which may sound a little like we’re in the sexiest era of professional bowling.”
Have you considered taking a DNA test to find out where your family is from? I sure have. I suspect that soon I’ll be among the millions of people who have done so. I’m glad I read It’s All Relative by A.J. Jacobs first though because it provides background information … Read More
“The enthusiasm of the educators statistically predicted their students’ ratings of enjoyment and perceived value in the subject matter.”
This is the first week in the spring semester at my college, and it’s a critical time for setting the tone and energy level in our classes. That’s why I’m turning again to James Lang’s excellent book Small Teaching, which focuses on simple ways to apply current research on teaching … Read More
“The deepest vocational question is not ‘What ought I to do with my life?’”
Rather, Parker Palmer writes, the more important questions are: “What am I? What is my nature?” These questions are more important because they require more self-knowledge. This knowledge must include, Palmer writes, acknowledgement of our limits and our potentials. Of course, it’s much more difficult to develop self-awareness than it … Read More