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Great Women Sculptors

The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
NonfictionSocial ScienceLGBTQ+

American Teenager

Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
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The Age of Magical Overthinking

Review by Deborah Mason

It’s hardly groundbreaking news that the world is increasingly confusing and isolating. Deaths by despair continue to rise, and America has long been in a mental health care crisis. Our screens feed our wildest conspiracy theories and our equally wild celebrity fantasies, while distancing us from friends and family. We put our faith in “manifesting” our reality, while ignoring the advice of experts. We have access to never-before-imagined amounts of information, but we are no wiser. We contrive conflicts with people online whom we have never met. Our anxiety culminates in a nagging question: “Is it them, or is it me?” Amanda Montell, author of The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, would probably answer, “It’s all of us.”

A linguist, podcaster and writer, Montell explored the links between language and power in her books Cultish and Wordslut. In her new book, Montell takes on an even more ambitious project: explaining how our cognitive biases combine with our brain functions to skew our perceptions of reality.

This is heavy stuff, but Montell combines erudition with humor and self-deprecation to make it accessible. Her explanations of a dozen cultural biases are clear and backed by research, while her cautionary tales of their destructive impact are personal, often hilarious and frequently moving. So, for example, her commitment to an abusive relationship was the result of the sunk cost fallacy—the conviction that “spending resources you can’t get back . . . justifies spending more.” Her affection for a thoroughly mediocre seat cushion that she made from “the innards of a neglected dog toy” is a charming symptom of the IKEA effect—that “we like things better when we’ve had a hand in creating them.” And our fascination with the vlogs of young women dying from painful disease is an example of survivorship bias. There is no condemnation or exasperation in this book, but there is plenty of humor, compassion and reason.

Reading The Age of Magical Overthinking feels like listening to your smartest friend give excellent advice. Hopefully, we’ll take it.

Amanda Montell explores our cultural and cognitive biases and their perilous consequences in the funny, compassionate The Age of Magical Overthinking.
NonfictionSelf-HelpEnvironment

Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Like so many of us, poet and Brown University professor Kate Schapira is deeply worried about the future of our planet. Rather than fret alone, in 2014 she set up her Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth (inspired by “Peanuts” character Lucy van Pelt) in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, as a means of communication and commiseration.

Now, she’s distilled what she heard, discussed, felt and learned into her debut book, Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live With Care and Purpose in an Endangered World. Schapira, who writes in a voice resonant with empathy, encouragement and fierce determination, recommends the book be read “in order and together” because “the progression of stories, questions, and practices is designed to unwind tightly tangled grief, frustration, exhaustion, and inertia . . . into a followable path of courage, capability, and strength.”

Such a path was far from clear when her booth debuted in 2014: “No one I knew seemed to want to discuss it at all,” she writes, “and that made me feel frantic and alone.” But as her network of climate-conscious compatriots grew, Schapira developed a process to help readers “transform what [they] feel, with others, into connection and action,” which this book details across eight chapters rife with information and analysis.

Schapira also takes on capitalism and white supremacy, which she believes create and perpetuate climate change. For example, she describes so-called sacrifice zones, “places where ecology, including human well-being, is sacrificed for power and profit,” noting residents “are usually people culturally devalued by their city or nation.” And she cites the work of activists she encountered, like Mark, who walked a cross-continent barefoot pilgrimage to Brooklyn-based BK ROT, a compost-hauling service whose hiring practices ensure “some of the people hit hardest by capitalism and white supremacy feed themselves, their families, and the soil.”

Ultimately, Schapira writes, her book is “not the last word on anything—or the first word either,” but it’s certainly a valuable reading experience for those seeking shared solace as well as motivation for positive, productive communal action. An extensive contributors and resources section, as well as a glossary, nicely bolster Schapira’s smart, heartfelt and inspirational efforts.

Kate Schapira offers a guide to transforming climate angst into collective action in her inspiring Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.

Where Rivers Part

In the extraordinary Where Rivers Part, Kao Kalia Yang writes with deep feeling and grace about her mother, a Hmong woman who escaped the cascading violence from the Vietnam War.
NonfictionSelf-Help

The Ritual Effect

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Behavioral scientist Michael Norton may be a business professor at Harvard, but he’s probably best known for his TEDx Talk, “How to Buy Happiness.” Norton’s lively new book, The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, may be just what the doctor ordered.

Many of us grow up associating rituals with traditional religions. Yet, Norton tells us, other kinds of rituals have an important place in our everyday lives. Personal, “secular rituals” can encompass everything from a child’s bedtime routine to activities more eccentric, like how Agatha Christie always ate an apple during her evening bath. Norton explains that rituals are different from mere habits; they strike our emotions more deeply and provide meaning to our lives.

While Norton does define what makes a ritual, his main focus is exploring the “ritual effect”: ways in which rituals can help us realize our human potential and face challenges, whether it’s public speaking, practicing self-control or being a more aware and responsive parent or partner. For example, in a section on relationship rituals, Norton discusses rituals that wake up our experience of commitment. These might be recognizing the special nature of annual celebrations, or even ordering the same takeout meal one night a week. Norton reminds us that “it matters much less what you do and much more that both of you do it regularly together.”

The Ritual Effect covers a wide range of rituals, including those associated with life-changing events like grief and loss. Norton’s examples draw from experts and a wide range of cultures and traditions. He closes his fascinating book with an invitation, or perhaps a challenge: to experiment with, explore and discover rituals to help you transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Michael Norton’s fascinating The Ritual Effect encourages us to experiment with, explore and discover rituals to help transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

The Exvangelicals

Mixing memoir and reportage, Sarah McCammon documents the growing number of young people who, like her, have left the evangelical fold to navigate a new world.
NonfictionMemoir

The Mango Tree

Review by Amanda Haggard

As we grow, we come to reckon with the pieces of ourselves that originate from the people who raised us. The realization can be both empowering and painful as we recognize the good and ugly traits we’ve absorbed and the lessons our parents imparted that we took to heart. In The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony, Annabelle Tometich untangles her identity in light of the unbearable moments she experienced being raised by a struggling and often enraged Filipino mother, and the loss of her white father who died during her childhood, taking with him the upper-middle-class privilege that he afforded her.

“All I wanted as a child was to be normal, to hide my weird family, their weird deaths and weird antics behind a big GPA and a spot as captain of the swim team,” she writes. “As an adult, I still strive for this ideal, knowing full well the impossibility of it.”

Her memoir begins in a Florida courtroom where her mother faces a felony charge for shooting out a man’s window in retaliation for picking a mango from her tree. The case, and tree, are a touchstone throughout the book as Tometich navigates her life story. Her mother and father fought mercilessly before his death. After her mother was left to parent on her own and went to work as a nurse, Tometich helped raise her younger siblings.

Tometich, now a food writer, started her career in medical school, then worked as a chef, and eventually landed a job at the sports desk at The News Press in Fort Myers, Florida. Here, she got the dreaded call from a co-worker about her mother’s court case. Anyone with a less than normal family can relate.

Not-so-perfect family dynamics—and the wounds that emerge from them—are popular literary fuel because of their universality. Yet it’s rare to see an author give an honest account of every bit of it, which in this case includes added layers of tragedy, racism and class struggle: the sting of hearing her grandmother use a slur against her mother, the bittersweetness of seeing her mother care for Tometich’s own child, the reckoning about the harm that was intended as good parenting. And, of course, the moment Tometich comes to recognize that it really is impossible to separate herself from her upbringing. In the end, The Mango Tree reminds us that all trees derive strength from their roots.

Annabelle Tometich’s memoir, The Mango Tree, may be about a fractured mother-daughter relationship, but it also understands that all trees derive strength from their roots.
NonfictionMemoirMedicine

Facing the Unseen

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Conventional wisdom has long held that mental illness is disconnected from physical health, requiring two separate courses of treatment. In Facing the Unseen: The Struggle to Center Mental Health in Medicine, psychiatrist Damon Tweedy aims to debunk this long-standing theory. The acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Black Man in a White Coat, Tweedy offers what feels like a personal invitation into his office, his expertise and, most of all, his hard-earned wisdom. 

Tweedy straightforwardly describes his training through Duke University School of Medicine, including his growing frustrations with an unsatisfactory system of care. He is critical of his colleagues for overlooking, stereotyping or dismissing the “unseen” signs of mental illness, bringing issues of class, race and gender into focus. He also questions his own biases, first as an aspiring cardiologist, and then as a psychiatrist struggling to understand how mind and body work together. 

Mostly, though, Facing the Unseen is about his patients. Tweedy is an excellent storyteller, making the people whom he treats unforgettably visible in all their complexities. Their stories embody why recognizing the mind-body connection is critical. There’s Natalie (all patients’ names are pseudonyms), an Iraq war veteran with PTSD, who came to the ER desperate for help. But treating her drug withdrawal was not considered a medical priority, and she was left to seek outpatient psychiatric care elsewhere. A passionate advocate for integrated medical and psychiatric care, Tweedy cites statistics that tally addiction and opioid abuse, PTSD, depression and anxiety, and the prevalent use of prescription pills. Throughout, he uses powerful descriptions that yield keen insights, showing us how the health care system sets doctors up to fail their patients, and offering solutions that will help. 

Improving access to effective treatments by coordinated caregivers is improving, but the need for better care is also growing. Facing the Unseen sounds both an alarm and a rallying cry. 

In Facing the Unseen, Black Man in a White Coat author Damon Tweedy makes an impassioned call for better mental health care.
NonfictionLifestylesCrafts, Hobbies & Home

The Soul of Gift Wrapping

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

If Marie Kondo inspired you to change the way you fold T-shirts, then artist Megumi Lorna Inouye’s guide to creating beautiful gift-wrapping is for you. Inouye traces her passion for this art to memories of watching her mother care for the lovingly wrapped garments in her kimono chest. In Japan, Inouye tells us, wrapping is considered part of the gift itself, a way to show respect, gratitude and love. And if your skills are confined to sticking presents into a bag, never fear. With a focus on sustainability, Inouye provides step-by-step instructions for wrapping, often making use of recycled materials or natural objects: Even a broken, moss-covered branch can add beauty to a gift. The photographs here are as elegant as the text, and useful too. And while the book is aimed at adults, it’s possible to do most of these projects with kids. The Soul of Gift Wrapping: Creative Techniques for Expressing Gratitude, Inspired by the Japanese Art of Giving is more than a how-to guide: This gorgeous book is a reminder that gift giving can bring the givers themselves joy.

The Soul of Gift Wrapping is a gorgeous reminder that gift giving can bring the givers themselves joy.

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