Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2025 Adult Nonfiction

TOO SENSITIVE de Sasha Hamdani

For readers who feel exquisitely and painfully hypersensitive, and who blame themselves for it, this book brings validation and a brain-based reason for it: Rejection Sensitive Disorder.

TOO SENSITIVE:
Understanding Rejection Sensitive Disorder and Building Emotional Resilience
by Dr. Sasha Hamdani
Flatiron Books, Fall 2026
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

While rejection and failure are challenging for everyone, those with Rejection Sensitive Disorder (RSD) experience them with an intensity that can feel overwhelming, even debilitating. The term dysphoria, which means « difficult to bear, » perfectly describes the emotional pain RSD can cause. It’s not just a matter of feeling hurt—it can lead to physical symptoms such as headaches, muscle tension, and digestive issues, as well as significant mental health impacts like anxiety and depression.

TOO SENSITIVE dives into the neurobiological roots of RSD, helping readers understand how their emotional sensitivity is not just a personality trait, but a deeply ingrained part of their neurobiology. This work offers not only an explanation of the condition but also practical tools for managing emotional sensitivity in everyday life by introducing CALM YOUR MIND, a simple yet powerful system of 12 strategies designed to help readers regulate their emotions in challenging situations. These principles, grounded in diverse therapeutic approaches, are followed by a comprehensive RSD Toolkit that offers in the moment help with dozens of real-life scenarios.

Ultimately, TOO SENSITIVE helps readers understand that emotional sensitivity is not a flaw, but instead a neurological trait that deserves compassion and care. This book provides actionable strategies to transform emotional sensitivity from a source of pain into a powerful tool for personal growth, resilience, and self-compassion.

Sasha Hamdani, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist specializing in ADHD, RSD, and emotional regulation. With a medical background that includes an accelerated program at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and residency training at the University of Arizona and University of Kansas Medical Center, Dr. Hamdani combines clinical expertise with personal experience. As the creator of FocusGenie and the author of Self-Care for People with ADHD (part of a series published by Adams Media in 2023), she has become a leading voice in mental health. Honored with the CHADD Early Career Influencer Award and invited to the inaugural White House Creator Mental Health Summit, Dr. Hamdani also reaches over 2 million followers across social media, regularly delivering educational content and speaking at major conferences. She has been featured in a TEDx talk on focus and in outlets like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.

THE BRILLIANCE OF DOLPHINS de Kelly Jaakkola

A wonderfully informative and entertaining book on how dolphins think, revealing the vast cognitive ability of so many of our animal companions. A book for all readers interested in the latest research on animal intelligence.

THE BRILLIANCE OF DOLPHINS:
Exploring the Curious Minds of the Sea
by Kelly Jaakkola, Ph.D.
Anchor/Doubleday, 2026
(via The Martell Agency)

Perhaps more than any other wild creature, we have long been dazzled by dolphin intelligence and their affecting level of interaction with humans. But what is the nature and dimension of dolphin intelligence? Do they count? Do they have language or anything like it? Can they imitate behavior (even if blindfolded)? How do they coordinate their communication and cooperation?

Writing with insight and wit, Jaakkola will reveal the crucial role of puzzles and games for both researching and challenging dolphins’ minds and take readers behind the scenes of her own research on dolphin cognition to show the logic of how we know what we know, as well as the complexity, humor, and pure thrill that comes from running creative experiments with animals who don’t know your intended script and very clearly have minds of their own. The new information presented enhances our understanding of the inner life of these special creatures, as they actually exist and can thrive in nature, not just in the popular imagination.

Kelly Jaakkola is a cognitive psychologist, marine mammal scientist, and Director of Research for DRC. She earned her Master’s degree in Psychology from Emory University, where she began her career studying cognition in chimpanzees and human children and received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from MIT. Her past research includes studies on number concepts, object permanence, imitation, and communication in dolphins, chimpanzees, and human children. Her current work focuses on dolphin cognition, communication, and welfare.

Dr. Jaakkola’s research has been published in numerous international scientific journals and book chapters, and her work on dolphin cognition has received worldwide coverage in newspapers, magazine articles, books, and television. She has taught courses on human and animal cognition at several colleges and chairs the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums.

CAVE MOUNTAIN de Benjamin Hale

With the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty-three years apart and the strange circumstances connecting them.

CAVE MOUNTAIN
by Benjamin Hale
Harper, March2026
(via DeFiore & Company)

This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley—Benjamin Hale’s cousin—got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance—and her account, after she was found, of the “imaginary friend” she met in the woods—would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.

Enriched by Benjamin Hale’s own family history and the lore of the Arkansas Ozarks, CAVE MOUNTAIN is a gripping story about nature and survival, religion and skepticism, and good and evil. At its center are two young girls, years apart, both in danger in the verdant wilds of northern Arkansas.

Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve, 2011) and the collection The Fat Artist and Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2016). His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Conjunctions, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is a senior editor at Conjunctions, teaches at Bard College and Columbia University, and lives in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley.

THE EXTREMIST MIND by Nafees Hamid

THE EXTREMIST MIND weaves together personal memoir with evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, political economics, and anthropological fieldwork with jihadists, white nationalists, QAnon devotees to explain how people develop and act on extremist beliefs.

THE EXTREMIST MIND:
What It Says About Human Nature and the Modern World
by Dr Nafees Hamid
Bloomsbury UK, 2026
(via Northbank Talent Management)

We’ve all been exposed to extremist, populist, and conspiratorial narratives and yet most of us roll our eyes at it or laugh it off. What causes some small minority of people to take these narratives seriously? What causes an even smaller percentage of that population to actually act on those narratives? Why do some even give their lives based on those ideas? And, most importantly, what can we do to stop people from committing political violence?

Cognitive scientist Nafees Hamid has travelled the world meeting members of ISIS, Hezbollah, NeoNazis, QAnon, and a variety of other violent and divisive movements. He has interviewed, surveyed, conducted psychology experiments with them and is one of the few people to have scanned their brains. The book details Nafees’s experiences going out into the field to find the subjects: from escaping an ISIS recruiter; to realising his research assistant had gradually been radicalised right under his nose; to a former flatmate who turned to QAnon during the pandemic, challenging Nafees to put into practice everything he had learned in order to de-program his friend.

Dr Nafees Hamid is a Cognitive Scientist of extremism, conspiracy theories, and political violence. In his current role at King’s College London, he co-leads a multi-nation research project which explores the role of trauma and mental health on pathways to peace versus violence in fragile and conflict affected states.