Archives de catégorie : Anthropology/Sociology

THE GRIEF CURE de Cody Delistraty

In this lyrical and moving story of the world of Prolonged Grief, journalist Cody Delistraty reflects on his experience with loss and explores what modern science, history, and literature reveal about the nature of our relationship to grief and our changing attitudes toward its cure.

THE GRIEF CURE
by Cody Delistraty
HarperCollins, June 2024
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

When Cody Delistraty lost his mother to cancer in his early 20s, he found himself unsure how to move forward. Planning for her recovery, he and his family had a purpose. But after she was gone, there seemed to exist only the empty advice on grief: move through the five stages, achieve closure, get back to work, go back to normal. So begins a journey into the new frontiers of grief, where Delistraty seeks out the researchers, technologists, therapists, marketers, and communities around the world looking to cure the pain of loss in novel ways. From the neuroscience of memory deletion to book prescriptions, laughter therapy, psilocybin, and Breakup Bootcamp, what ultimately emerges is not so much a cure as a fresh understanding of what living with grief truly means.

As Delistraty followed the blueprint of his own ad hoc treatment plan, the question of whether the most painful kind of grief can and should be cured had also been taken up by the American Psychiatry Association, as they recently gave extended, intense, disruptive grief an official name: Prolonged Grief Disorder. Stamping this kind of grief with a diagnosis has opened innovative avenues of treatment and an important conversation about a debilitating form of grief, but it also raises the question of whether grief, no matter how severe, is best treated medically at all?

Rigorously researched and beautifully written, The Grief Cure is a moving and eye-opening chronicle of a new diagnosis and a wide-ranging cultural history of grief of all sorts as a human rite. Braiding deep, emotional resonance with sharp research and historical insight, Delistraty places his own experience in dialogue with great writers and thinkers throughout history who have puzzled over this eternal question: how might we best face loss?

Cody Delistraty is the culture editor at The Wall Street Journal Magazine. He has written essays and criticism for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and, while living in Paris for several years, he was the European arts columnist for The Paris Review. He has degrees in politics from New York University and history from the University of Oxford, where he graduated with a double distinction (first class). He and his work have been featured on WNYC, France 5 and Arté; British Vogue named him a best young writer of the year; and he has given corporate talks about tragedy, art, and creativity to companies like PwC.

WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR? d’Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman

Aimed at philosophers and non-philosophers alike, this is a modern argument about the ambivalence towards childbearing and how to overcome it.

WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR?
Affirming Life in an Age of Ambivalence
by Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman
St. Martin’s Press, June 2024

Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, the Millennial and Gen Z generations are finding it increasingly hard to judge in its favor. WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR? seeks to loosen the grip of the shallow narratives that either lament growing childlessness as a mark of cultural decline, or celebrate it as unambiguous evidence of social progress. Berg and Wiseman explore philosophical and cultural examples of this debate, whether from modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, second-wave feminists in the 1970s, or the current trend of dystopian novels and stories. In the tradition of Jenny Odell and Amia Srinivasan, Berg and Wiseman write with clear logic and passionate prose to offer those struggling the guidance necessary to move beyond their uncertainty. They argue that when we make the individual decision whether or not to have children we confront a profound philosophical question, that of the goodness of life itself. How can we justify perpetuating human life given the catastrophic harm and suffering of which we are always at once both victims and perpetrators? WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR? concludes that we must embrace the fundamental goodness of human life—not only in theory, but in our everyday lives.

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman first explored these questions in an essay for The Point on choosing to have children, the rare work of philosophical inquiry to have gone viral; Berg recently discussed her own decision to pursue having a family in the context of the novel coronavirus in a widely read op-ed in the New York Times. Frequent collaborators and close friends, Anastasia Berg is currently based in Cambridge and will start as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University. She is expecting her first child. Rachel Wiseman lives in Chicago, where she is the managing editor of The Point, an award-winning nonfiction literary magazine.

FOUR MOTHERS d’Abigail Leonard

In the tradition of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women and Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, FOUR MOTHERS follows four women—Anna from Finland, Tsukasa from Japan, Sarah from the U.S., and Chelsea from Kenya—through the first year of motherhood.

FOUR MOTHERS
by Abigail Leonard
Algonquin, Fall 2025)
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Abigail blends reporting, research, and history to create an international portrait of new motherhood and the policies that scaffold this transitional phase of life. As debates surrounding paid leave, universal daycare, and national healthcare rage on across different corners of the globe, FOUR MOTHERS is an intimate narrative of what those policies mean in the everyday lives of four women—and a compelling argument for the necessity and urgency of supporting parents.

Abigail Leonard is an award-winning international reporter and news producer. Her work has appeared in NPR, Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Vox. She has written and produced long-form news documentaries for PBS, ABC and Al Jazeera America. Stories she reported have earned an Emmy Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, an Association of Health Care Journalists Award, a National Headliner Award, and a James Beard Foundation Media Award Nomination.

BREAKING BIAS d’Anu Gupta

If bias is something learned, not a trait we’re born with, then how do we unlearn it?

BREAKING BIAS
Where Stereotypes & Prejudices Come From—and the Science-Backed Method to Unravel Them
by Anu Gupta
Hay House, September 2024
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

Growing up in India and the United States, and being a brown-skinned, cis-gendered, gay man with an Indian name, Anu has experienced different levels of bias, privilege, and prejudice in his life—ranging from the subtly stinging to the all-out violent—and he knows intimately the importance of breaking not only interpersonal bias, but our own internalized biases. Today, he is the founder of BE MORE with Anu, an organization that funds independent research on breaking bias and has provided anti-bias trainings to hundreds of companies around the world.

In his first book, Anu will provide readers with a solid foundation in understanding the different types of bias (internalized, interpersonal, and institutional) and their root causes: social contact, education, media, cultural stories, and institutional policies. Then, he’ll teach them how to break it.

At the heart of Anu’s work is the PRISM Toolkit, a mindfulness-based training program that Anu developed in partnership with a cross-disciplinary board of scientists at BE MORE. PRISM stands for Perspective-Taking, pRosocial Behavior, Individuation, Stereotype Replacement, and Mindfulness. These tools have been shown to measurably break bias through regular practice—with the added benefits of strengthening relationships, increasing resilience, reducing stress and anxiety, and even enhancing memory and cognition.

At a time when so many people are desperate for real solutions to structural inequality BREAKING BIAS will expand the important conversation and provide readers with the specific tools needed to address bias in all its forms—racism, sexism, classism, and more.

Anu Gupta is a scientist, educator, lawyer, and the founder & CEO of BE MORE with Anu, an e-learning company that trains organizations in breaking bias. He has spent five years developing and testing a unique science-backed, data-driven methodology that trains people in measurably breaking bias, with funding from National Science Foundation, New York State Health Foundation, American Heart Association, and On Being, among others. He has led hundreds of DEI programs that train professionals in this methodology. Anu has appeared on The Oprah Conversation with Oprah Winfrey, and his writing has been featured in Newsweek, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review and more.

RAPE GIRL de Jamie Hood

A necessarily illuminating text, imagining stranger, more radical models of storytelling. Combining the hybridity of Camen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House with the intensity of Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty, RAPE GIRL promises to do for sexual violence what Citizen did for conversations around race, and become part of a new wave of cultural resistance.

RAPE GIRL:
A Study in Nine Parts
by Jamie Hood
Pantheon/Random House, Spring 2024
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

In many ways, RAPE GIRL: A STUDY IN NINE PARTS is the book that essayist, critic, and poet Jamie Hood has been writing her entire life. In the thirty years since her first sexual assault (age six, by the neighbor), it has taken many forms: a chronological, straight memoir of violence; a book-length poem; a manifesto; a novel. In the wake of each subsequent attack (twice as a teenager, several times in graduate school, most recently at a Brooklyn bar), and resultant attempt to narrativize the violence, what became clear was that no single genre was able to capture the entirety of what she was trying to say.
Trauma disorients the very possibility of straightforward narrative, so then why do we expect our tellings of it to be linear and easily digestible? RAPE GIRL asks: what is rape at its core? And beyond: how would an account of rape that acknowledges and incorporates the truth of trauma as an experience shift the conversation?
Told in nine parts—media historical, political, poetic, autofictional, literary critical, and memoiristic—RAPE GIRL reckons with the confessional imperative of survivors and the role of rape narratives in our collective consciousness. Weaving between genres and throughout history, Hood consults Artemesia Gentileschi and other foremothers in revenge and witness, documents a month of walking the exact route that she took to escape an assailant, tangles with the specter of Dick Wolf and Law & Order, reflects on her own coping mechanisms and childhood in Virginia, probes the specific silence around trans women’s experience of rape, and interrogates what it means to enter a post-#MeToo era of backlash in 2022.

Jamie Hood is a critic, memoirist, and poet, and the author of how to be a good girl (Grieveland 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Baffler, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, Observer, The Drift, SSENSE, Bookforum, Vogue, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.