Archives de catégorie : London 2024 Nonfiction

RISING UP de Brennan Spiegel

As long as life has existed on Earth—from the simplest organisms to Homo sapiens—gravity has inexorably shaped our world.

RISING UP
How Gravity Shapes Our Bodies and Minds
by Brennan Spiegel
St. Martin’s Press, Fall 2025
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Although this hidden force strains every fiber of our bodies, every moment of our lives, we often neglect its relentless impact on our health. But to what extent does gravity shape our sensations, our emotions, and our overall wellbeing? The answers will astonish you.

In RISING UP, Professor Brennan Spiegel presents a groundbreaking exploration into how gravity influences not just celestial bodies, but also underlies conditions of body and mind that have puzzled medical professionals for centuries. Beginning with a simple observation at a family dinner and culminating in a landmark study by the author that garnered worldwide attention, RISING UP invites you on a captivating journey through the human body’s inner struggle to keep us upright and healthy.

Why do people with depression literally feel like they’re being dragged to the ground? Why do you get that butterfly feeling in your stomach when falling on a rollercoaster? Why do you get it when “falling” in love? What can we learn from astronauts with heartburn and swollen faces to inform our lives back on Earth? How do gut microbes help us fight gravity? And most important, just how do we change our relationship with gravity for the better?

In answering these questions, Spiegel unveils the concept of “gravity resilience” and introduces the “personal gravity profile” to help readers understand gravity’s imprint on their own mind and body. Understanding your profile can illuminate why certain activities feel more challenging or why you might experience discomfort in situations where gravity’s influence is altered, like on a rollercoaster, or during a yoga class, or up in an airplane.

Moreover, he introduces a new way of thinking about weight loss, exercise, diet, and meditation. Rather than just being lifestyle choices, these treatments are united by a profound and unexpected commonality: they all enhance our resilience to gravity. Throughout the book, Spiegel offers additional practices for withstanding gravity’s demands.

Equally rooted in hard science and compelling storytelling, Rising Up turns a new page in our understanding of what it means to be a human living on Earth. This isn’t merely a book about medicine or science; it’s a startling revelation about the very essence of the human condition.

Brennan Spiegel, MD, MSHS, is the Dorothy and George Gourrich Chair in Digital Health Ethics at Cedars-Sinai, Assistant Dean for Clinical and Translational Research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Founding Director of the Cedars-Sinai Master’s Program in Health Delivery Science. He is the immediate past Editor-in-Chief for the American Journal of Gastroenterology and inaugural Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Medical Extended Reality. Dr. Spiegel has published widely in the fields of health services research, digital health science, and clinical medicine with 280 peer-reviewed manuscripts that have been cited over 23,700 times in the biomedical literature.

MEDITATION FOR MODERN MADNESS de Dzogchen Rinpoche

You are already enlightened. You don’t need to get enlightened again or to make your enlightenment better. You just need to recognize who you already are.

MEDITATION FOR MODERN MADNESS
by Dzogchen Rinpoche
Wisdom Publications, September 2025

Dzogchen is an ancient Tibetan tradition that is perfect for countering the stress of our modern lives. A simple and quick method, Dzogchen is practical and direct, and open to us all—you simply need to recognize the great potential that is naturally born within everyone.

In his highly anticipated first book, the Seventh Dzogchen Rinpoche, Jigme Losel Wangpo, shows us how our everyday lives can be turned into spiritual practice—not only to ease our stress, but to allow the true nature of our minds to reveal itself, right now, on the spot. The Dzogchen view is the highest view, the view from the top of the mountain. We need to build a platform that will hold the view, and Dzogchen Rinpoche provides the meditations and advice for living that will help you do just that. In turn, you’ll find true peace in a mind at rest.

His Eminence the Seventh Dzogchen Rinpoche, Jigme Losel Wangpo, is the holder of the Dzogchen lineage. He was born in Sikkim in 1964 into the Lakar Tsang family, a noble family whose connection to the Dzogchen tradition and the great masters of Tibet dates back over many centuries. His Eminence’s father was the late Tsewang Paljor, whose family lineage is of terton descent traced back to Dudul Nuden Dorje. Tsewang Paljor was greatly respected and renowned as the private secretary to the second Jamyang Khyentse of Dzongsar, Dorje Chang, Chökyi Lodrö. His Eminence’s mother is Pema Tsering Wangmo of the Lakar Tsang family, known as great patrons of Dharma in the Kham region of eastern Tibet.

Around the time of Dzogchen Rinpoche’s birth, both parents had many auspicious dreams. There were also many auspicious signs to indicate the incarnation of a great master. Even before his official recognition, many respected lamas came to visit this incredible young boy. His Holiness the Fourth Dodrupchen Rinpoche, Thupten Trinley Palzang, recognized Rinpoche as the Dzogchen lineage holder in a clear pure-light vision at the time of his conception and later performed his enthronement ceremony in Sikkim’s Royal Palace in Gangtok on the eighth of October, 1972.

Rinpoche began his spiritual training at the Nyingma Institute, where he received private teachings from Dodrupchen Rinpoche and Khenpo Rahor Thupten. At the age of twelve, Dzogchen Rinpoche was invited to study at the Buddhist School of Dialectics in Dharamsala by His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, who personally supervised his education. Rinpoche was also instructed by many other great lamas in ritual practice and academic study. Other senior masters trained Dzogchen Rinpoche in ritual and grammar. Rinpoche also simultaneously undertook Gelug philosophical. Later on, he received Dzogchen lineage transmission, including the teachings of Longchenpa, from Khenchen Pema Tsewang.

Historically, the Dzogchen Rinpoches have a close connection with the Medicine Buddha, and he is known to have transformed the health of many people. The Seventh Dzogchen Rinpoche’s work also has charitable dimensions. Recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile for his outstanding commitment to the welfare of the Tibetan community, Rinpoche has transformed the Dhondenling Tibetan settlement through two decades of community development.

BEARING THE UNBEARABLE de Joanne Cacciatore

Grief expert Joanne Cacciatore (author of the bestselling Bearing the Unbearable) provides support and guidance, as writing prompts, for anyone experiencing traumatic loss and grief.

BEARING THE UNBEARABLE
A Guided Journal For Grieving
by Joanne Cacciatore
Wisdom Publications, April 2024

From the bestselling author of Bearing the Unbearable and Grieving Is Loving, here are 52 writing prompts for exploring grief and journaling about those whom we’ve lost. Writing about those we’ve lost can be part of a contemplative practice, alone or with therapists, family, friends, or with a grief support group. However you use this journal and its writing prompts, please take the time to write from the heart, really be with each prompt, dive deeply—and do so with a spirit of love and compassion for all beings, including yourself.

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore has a fourfold relationship with bereavement. She is herself a bereaved mother: her newborn daughter died on July 27, 1994, and that single tragic moment catapulted her unwillingly onto the reluctant path of traumatic grief. For more than two decades, she’s devoted herself to direct practice with grief, helping traumatically bereaved people on six continents. She’s also been researching and writing about grief for more than a decade in her role as associate professor at Arizona State University and director of the Graduate Certificate in Trauma and Bereavement program there. And, in addition, she’s the founder of an international nongovernmental organization, the MISS Foundation, dedicated to providing multiple forms of support to families experiencing the death of a child at any age and from any cause, and since 1996 has directed the foundation’s family services and clinical education programs.

Cacciatore is an ordained Zen priest, affiliated with Zen Garland and its child bereavement center outside of New York City. She is an acclaimed public speaker and provides expert consulting and witness services in the area of traumatic loss. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Lancet, Social Work and Healthcare, and Death Studies, among others. She received her PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in psychology from Arizona State University. Her work has been featured in major media sources such as People and Newsweek magazines, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, CNN, National Public Radio, and the Los Angeles Times. She has been the recipient of many regional and national awards for her empathic work and service to people suffering traumatic grief. She travels quite often but spends most of her time in Sedona, Arizona, with her family and three rescue dogs.

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING RIGHT de Matt Kaplan

Science correspondent for The Economist for over a decade, Matt Kaplan asks: How broken is science? How much innovation are we losing every year, how much more could there be? And is science more or less broken today than it has been in the past?

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING RIGHT
by Matt Kaplan
St. Martin’s Press, 2026)
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

What follows is a delightfully surprising trip through history. Kaplan centers this book on the story of Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweiss, one of the first to propose handwashing in the 1850s—a breakthrough that would ruin his life. Excoriated by his colleagues, Semmelweis was placed by them into a mental institution and died there after being beaten by guards. In order to tell this story, Kaplan looks to other Victorian contemporaries as counterexamples – Lister, Pasteur, Darwin. These figures, so celebrated by science, had many traits that Semmelweis lacked: powerful friends, wealthy families and donors—and in some cases, a willingness to cheat, lie, and commit fraud.

Kaplan takes us on a journey through not only the Victorian era, but into contemporary paleontology conferences with scientists screaming at one another, into esteemed academic circles, and shows why reporting on the Covid-19 vaccine upended everything he thought he knew about what was possible for scientific advancement.

Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent with The Economist. He has also contributed to National Geographic, New Scientist, Nature, and The New York Times. He is the author of the book The Science of Monsters. In 2014, Kaplan was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship which he used to study the sciences at MIT and folklore at Harvard.

THE BARN de Wright Thompson

A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long.

THE BARN
The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
by Wright Thompson
Penguin Press, September 2024
(via David Black Literary Agency)

Wright Thompson’s family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing.

In August 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. After their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading about where the long night of hell took place and who was involved. In fact, Wright Thompson reveals, at least eight people can be placed at the scene, which was inside the barn of one of the killers, on a plot of land within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues on nearby Dockery Plantation.

Even in the context of the racist caste regime of the time, the four-hour torture and murder of a Black boy barely in his teens for whistling at a young white woman was acutely depraved; Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this story—the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map. As he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power, about white supremacy. It implicates all of us. In THE BARN, Thompson meets the few people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light, people like Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till’s friend, who came down from Chicago with him that summer, and is the last person alive to know him well. Wheeler Parker’s journey to put the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a journey we all need to go on if this country is to heal from its oldest, deepest wound.

Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN and the bestselling author of Pappyland and The Cost of These Dreams. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his family.