Archives de catégorie : Essay

UNTITLED ESSAY de Tyson Yunkaporta

A new essay by Tyson Yunkaporta, the best-selling author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.

UNTITLED ESSAY
by Tyson Yunkaporta
Text Publishing, October 2023

When Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk was published in 2018, the American writer Tommy Orange commented that it ‘shows how vital and alive and essential Indigenous ways of being and thinking are.’ Sand Talk examined global systems from an Indigenous point view. It was, as Miles Franklin-winning author Melissa Lukashenko remarked, ‘an extraordinary invitation into the world of the Dreaming’.
Tyson Yunkaporta’s new book extends his explorations of how we can think and act and speak by combining an analysis of indigenous thinking and living with an equally revelatory critique of postindustrial society. Like Sand Talk, this new book is a formidably original essay.
It describes how the ways that we relate to each other are inseparable from how we relate to the environments we live in. It is about how we talk to each other, or yarn: how we teach and learn. Along the way, Tyson talks to a range of people: liberal economists, performance and memorisation experts, Nordic stone carvers, Frisian ecologists, and Indigenous Australian thought-leaders, mathematicians, and storytellers.
This book is a sequence of thought experiments, which are, as Yunkaporta writes, ‘crowd-sourced narratives where everybody’s contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honoured and included…the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call “yarning”.’

Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar, and founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne. His work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global issues. His first book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, was published in 2019 and won the Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards and the Ansari Institute’s Randa and Sherif Nasr Book Prize on Religion & the World.

THE WORLD AFTER UKRAINE de Garry Kasparov

From renowned strategist and Russia expert, a new book on how to respond to the global crises we face today.

THE WORLD AFTER UKRAINE:
A Return to Values and the Building of a New Moral Order
by Garry Kasparov
Public Affairs, June 2023
(via The Gernert Company)

When Garry Kasparov’s 2015 book Winter is Coming predicted that Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine, its warnings were largely ignored. But seven years later, his prophecies have come true – and it has finally shocked the West into action. America and many of its NATO allies have sent massive aid packages and defense weapons, and begun isolating Putin from his financial enablers. The effect has been powerful, and we can now begin to imagine his defeat, and what might follow it.
In THE WORLD AFTER UKRAINE, Kasparov again sees several moves ahead of the rest of us. He shows that the Ukraine crisis has brought us to a key moment: a chance to stem the rise of dictatorship across the globe. By showing the might of democracy and recommitting to a set of moral values we have allowed ourselves to ignore, we can fight back. He identifies the core tenets of this program in this book, and makes the case for how they can win the day.
Relying on his own experiences as first a Russian dissident, then an American civilian and the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, Kasparov tells stories of oppression and autocracy across the globe, showing how they’ve been enabled by a world order that prizes strategic and financial assets above morality. He names the ideas and actions that can contain the threat of dictatorship and move us to a brighter, freer future.

Garry Kasparov is a Russian pro-democracy leader, global human rights activist, business speaker and former world chess champion. He is the author of Deep Thinking and Winter Is Coming, among other books.

THE WORDS THAT MATTER de Susan Verde

From the New York Times #1 bestselling author Susan Verde, an essay collection that emphasizes the importance of positive self-talk and the impact it has on raising children.

THE WORDS THAT MATTER:
Learning to Speak to Myself (and Others) with Love
by Susan Verde
Abrams Image, March 2023

Bestselling children’s book author Susan Verde turns her attention from children to the adults who care for them. The stories in THE WORDS THAT MATTER are filled with honesty and vulnerability, as Verde shares both the words of her own inner critic and what she has learned about approaching that voice with curiosity and compassion. She shares ways to rethink how we speak to ourselves in order to cultivate our own self-love and show our children that self-love is not only achievable but necessary.
A single mom of three very different kids, each with their own needs and challenges, Verde knows firsthand that motherhood can be rough. However, she understands that the words we say to ourselves are what enable us to show up for our kids. THE WORDS THAT MATTER is meant to offer actionable ways to change our inner speak from negative to supportive, and serves as a gentle guide for anyone who wants to remember how worthy and wonderful they are and to pass those feelings of self-worth on to their kids.

Susan Verde is a New York Times bestselling children’s author, children’s yoga and mindfulness expert, former teacher, and parent. She has more than 20 picture books in the marketplace. She is a highly sought after speaker at conferences, festivals, and schools across the nation, and spends half the year on the road working with children and families. Verde is a frequent contributor to online magazines and has appeared on multiple podcasts speaking about writing, parenting, mindfulness, and yoga. She lives in East Hampton, New York.

MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING de Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard

Weaving together cultural criticism, personal narrative, historical diversions, and on-the-ground research, MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING is a search for pure, loud, vibrant sensory experience and the knowledge that can only come from that source.

MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING:
In Pursuit of Sensuous Life in the Digital Age
by Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard
Ecco/HarperCollins, Summer 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

As physical life on earth grows increasingly fraught and imperiled, technology moves to take us out of our bodies and into our screens. Capital is flooding into the development of the metaverse, designed to engulf us even more fully in tech’s trackable, commodifiable sphere.
And as the influence of these newly manufactured modes of experience promises to grow more fixed and invasive, it is not hyperbole to suggest that the years ahead will require us to reckon with questions that, at first glance, may seem surreal: What is the point of physical life? What are our bodies for?
Although we are saturated by an overload of stimuli, we engage with our actual physical senses—touch, taste, sight, scent, and sound—less and less. It’s no surprise we face an epidemic of depression and disassociation; no wonder that, in an era that demands engagement, we often find ourselves numb, forgetful, and detached. We need an urgent and necessary alternative: a return to the vital purpose and pleasure of our embodied senses.
This is precisely the mission of MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING, a multi-hyphenate work of narrative non-fiction offering a radical reappraisal of the five senses in our break-neck technological world, as well as our sense of time, place, and of self.
With the improbably intermingled properties of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING is a personalized, thematically anchored quest narrative that proposes a defiant way forward for sensory life.

Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard was born in Chicago in 1992, the year Apple declared handheld devices would change the world. A 2021 finalist for the Krause Essay Prize, her work has appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The Paris Review Daily, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, The Idler, The White Review, The New Statesman, and elsewhere in print and online. Her research on the societal impacts of artificial intelligence has received recognition and funding from the Royal Society, the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence in Cambridge and Oxford. A graduate of Stanford and the University of Cambridge, she has, for better or worse, spent several years working in the tech industry.

THIRTEEN WAYS TO SMELL A TREE de David George Haskell

THIRTEEN WAYS TO SMELL A TREE takes you on a journey to connect with trees through the sense most aligned to our emotions and memories.

THIRTEEN WAYS TO SMELL A TREE
by David George Haskell
‎ Octopus UK/Viking US, October 2021
(via The Martell Agency)

Thirteen essays are included that explore the evocative scents of trees, from the smell of a book just printed as you first open its pages, to the calming scent of Linden blossom, to the ingredients of a particularly good gin & tonic. In your hand: a highball glass, beaded with cool moisture. In your nose: the aromatic embodiment of globalized trade. The spikey, herbal odour of European juniper berries. A tang of lime juice from a tree descended from wild progenitors in the foothills of the Himalayas. Bitter quinine, from the bark of the South American cinchona tree, spritzed into your nostrils by the pop of sparkling tonic water. Take a sip, feel the aroma and taste of three continents converge.
Each essay also contains a practice the reader is invited to experience. For example, taking a tree inventory of our own home, appreciating just how many things around us came from trees. And if you’ve ever hugged a tree when no one was looking, try breathing in the scents of different trees that live near you, the smell of pine after the rain, the refreshing, mind-clearing scent of a eucalyptus leaf crushed in your hand.

British-born biologist, award-winning author and celebrated academic David George Haskell’s work integrates scientific, literary and contemplative studies of the natural world. Haskell holds degrees from the University of Oxford (BA) and from Cornell University (PhD). He is Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of the South, where he served as Chair of Biology. His scientific research on animal ecology, evolution and conservation has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the World Wildlife Fund among others. He serves on the boards and advisory committees of local and national land conservation groups. His previous books include The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors and The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.