Archives de catégorie : London 2021 Nonfiction

THE SHAPE OF SOUND de Fiona Murphy

Blending memoir with observations on the healthcare industry, THE SHAPE OF SOUND is a story about the corrosive power of secrets, stigma and shame, and how deaf experiences and disability are shaped by economics, social policy, medicine and societal expectations.

THE SHAPE OF SOUND
by Fiona Murphy
Text Publishing Australia, April 2021

I am still unlearning the habit of secrecy. And yet, whenever somebody discovers that I am deaf, my body still reacts with churning terror. How do you build up a sense of robust pride when your body has taught itself to be fearful?
Fiona Murphy’s memoir about being deaf is a revelation.
Secrets are heavy, burdensome things. Imagine carrying a secret that if exposed could jeopardise your chances of securing a job and make you a social outcast. Fiona Murphy kept her deafness a secret for over twenty-five years. But then, desperate to hold onto a career she’d worked hard to pursue, she tried hearing aids. Shocked by how the world sounded, she vowed never to wear them again. After an accident to her hand, she discovered that sign language could change her life, and that Deaf culture could be part of her identity. Just as Fiona thought she was beginning to truly accept her body, she was diagnosed with a rare condition that causes the bones of the ears to harden. She was steadily losing her residual hearing. The news left her reeling. This is the story of how Fiona learns to listen to her body.

Fiona Murphy is a Deaf poet and essayist. Her work has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Griffith Review and the Big Issue, among other publications. In 2019, she was awarded the Overland Fair Australia Essay Prize and the Monash Undergraduate Creative Writing Prize. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the Richell Prize and highly commended by the Wheeler Centre Next Chapter program.

FILTERWORLD de Kyle Chayka

Author of The Longing For Less and a contributor to The New Yorker and NYT Magazine, Kyle Chayka’s FILTERWORLD focuses on the history and investigation of living in a world ruled by algorithms, which profoundly determine and shape culture in both digital and physical spaces, leading to flat and frictionless experiences that are remaking human identity.

FILTERWORLD:
How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Doubleday, Fall 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

You’ve seen the smooth, uncanny artifacts: a blank, white café that looks like it could be located anywhere in the world; TikTok dance videos repeating in a dull echo; restaurant design and food plating which begs to be posted on Instagram; endlessly bingeable streaming television; influencers’ faces made up and surgically altered towards a certain photogenic ideal. While appearing in different mediums, these pieces of culture are characterized by a slick sameness. Rather than provoking us, they’re pleasing, ambient, frictionless.
In this new book, Kyle Chayka argues that these seemingly disparate cultural phenomena all have been shaped by a similar force: the algorithms governing and filtering the content that appears on digital platforms. We increasingly live in a world where the culture we encounter is not simply curated by these algorithms, but in which algorithms profoundly determine and shape culture itself in both digital and physical spaces. Chayka names this new reality, of a world both inescapably mediated and changed by algorithmic filtration, “Filterworld”.
In FILTERWORLD, Chayka traces a brief history of how we arrived in this place—from the rise of the algorithm through the corresponding erosion of human curation and taste—before launching a penetrating exploration of the flat hallmarks of Filterworld byproducts and the way that algorithmically determined taste is fundamentally reshaping human identity. Ultimately a pointed critique of the frictionless culture of Filterworld, the book turns towards what we might do to escape and dismantle this numbing cycle.
Building on the popular criticism Kyle Chayka has published for both The New Yorker online and elsewhere, FILTERWORLD is the product of a career spent as one of our keenest observers of the intersection of technology and modern culture. While much has been written about the way that algorithms impact everything from news to policy, there has been no major book published on the impact of algorithms on culture.
FILTERWORLD will appeal strongly to readers of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: a book that not only seeks to give language to the slippery ways that technology is reshaping our lived experience, but also gives readers tools to imagine a world in which things could be otherwise.

Kyle Chayka is a freelance writer and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, n+1, Vox, the Paris Review, and other publications. He has contributed chapters to Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology and A Companion to Digital Art. Chayka is cofounder of Study Hall, a newsletter and digital community for journalists. He began his career as a visual art critic for Hyperallergic in Brooklyn, and now lives in Washington, D.C.

MUTINOUS WOMEN de Joan DeJean

From distinguished scholar Joan DeJean, the secret history of the rebellious Frenchwomen who were exiled to colonial Louisiana and found power in the Mississippi Valley.

MUTINOUS WOMEN:
How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast
by Joan DeJean
Basic Books, April 2022

In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women. Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship’s hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi.
Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, MUTINOUS WOMEN introduces us to the Gulf South’s Founding Mothers.

« What transpired after they landed ashore, however, is a clear demonstration of the beauty and power of the feminine spirit, and DeJean chronicles their experiences in well-written, often gripping prose….Readers will come away fascinated and inspired by this relatively unknown tale of strength and the human spirit. » —Kirkus (starred review)

“Gripping from its opening scene of a corpse discovered on a Paris side street, Joan DeJean’s MUTINOUS WOMEN tells the stories of these French women, deported as unwanted criminals to what would become, less than a century later, part of the United States… Through astounding research in French and Louisiana archives… Ms. DeJean uses her knowledge as a scholar of early modern France to great effect. … A fascinating history and a reminder that all kinds of people helped to build what became the United States.” —Wall Street Journal

“Working with a chaotic and often confusing historical record, DeJean traces the constellation of forces—including avarice, corruption and misogyny—that permitted the rapid roundup of another 96 or so female prisoners to be transported in the dank hold of La Mutine. The horrific conditions of the women’s journey and the will to survive that must have sustained them when they were set down, largely without resources, in a barren, swampy, inhospitable land, are evoked in vivid detail.” —New York Times Book Review

Joan DeJean is Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at Yale and Princeton. She is the author of eleven books on French literature, history, and material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including most recently How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (2014); The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern Home Began (2009); and The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (2005). She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Paris, France.

THE BODY CODE de Dr. Bradley Nelson

A powerful new approach to natural, intuitive whole-body healing from the bestselling author of The Emotion Code.

THE BODY CODE:
Unlocking Your Body’s Ability to Heal Itself
by Dr. Bradley Nelson
St. Martin’s Essentials, February 2023

THE BODY CODE is a truly revolutionary method of holistic healing. Dr. Bradley Nelson, a globally renowned expert in bioenergetic medicine, has spent decades teaching his powerful self-healing method and training practitioners around the globe, but this is the first time his system of healing will be available to the general public in the form of THE BODY CODE.
THE BODY CODE  is based on the simple premise that the body is self-healing and knows what it needs in order to thrive and flourish. The Body Code method allows readers to tap into this inner knowing, and find imbalances in 6 key areas―Energies, Circuits and Systems, Toxicity, Nutrition and Lifestyle, Misalignments, and Pathogens―that are the root causes of our physical, mental and emotional issues. By identifying and releasing these imbalances, readers become empowered to activate their body’s innate healing power.

Filled with powerful first-hand accounts of healing, hundreds of color illustrations, and concrete, actionable steps, THE BODY CODE  is a road map to healing based in deep study of the human body, time-proven ancient practices, and the unlimited power of the subconscious mind.

Dr. Bradley Nelson is the author of The Emotion Code, an incredible breakthrough method that makes it possible for anyone to release their emotional baggage for a happier and healthier life. He is recognized worldwide as one of the foremost experts in the field of bioenergetic medicine, and has taught his healing methods to acclaim around the world. He is the father of seven children and lives with his wife Jean in Southern Utah.

MARKED FOR LIFE de Isaac Wright, Jr.

This is the incredible memoir of a man wrongfully imprisoned for life and his epic journey to free himself and others like him.

MARKED FOR LIFE: The Trials of Isaac Wright, Jr.
by Isaac Wright, Jr.
St. Martin’s Press, April 2022

His story forms the basis for ABC’s hit television series For Life produced by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, now in its second season. In 1991 Isaac Wright Jr. was wrongly accused of drug charges in New Jersey and sentenced to life in prison. He was arrested, tried, and convicted under a draconian “kingpin” statute even though he never dealt drugs a day in his life; even though the prosecutor knew he was innocent, as did the detectives who investigated him and the cops who arrested him; even though his co-defendants—some of whom were guilty of the very things pinned on him—were given freedom in exchange for their lies about what he did and who he was. Wright used the prison library to educate himself in the law and helped overturn the wrongful convictions of dozens of his fellow inmates before representing himself, proving his own innocence, and bringing down the powerful and corrupt men that had aligned against him.

Isaac Wright Jr. is an American lawyer in the state of New Jersey and a candidate in the 2021 New York City mayoral election. He was convicted to life in prison in 1991 after a five-week trial by a 12-person jury of 10 charges involving the sale of cocaine, but his conviction was overturned in 1997 after litigation brought by him and his lawyer. During his time in prison he worked as a paralegal with the Inmate Legal Association and helped to overturn the wrongful convictions of many of his fellow inmates. The ABC legal drama television series For Life is inspired by his life.