Archives de catégorie : Memoir

THE EXTREME BRAIN by Nafees Hamid

THE EXTREME BRAIN weaves together personal memoir with evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, political economics, and anthropological fieldwork with jihadists, white nationalists, QAnon devotees, and violent extremists of other stripes including climate activists who tried to recruit Nafees to teach them the ways of ISIS.

THE EXTREME BRAIN
by Dr Nafees Hamid
TBD
(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.

MADE UP BUT STILL TRUE de Donald Sutherland

The long-awaited memoir from renowned actor Donald Sutherland.

MADE UP BUT STILL TRUE
by Donald Sutherland
Crown, November 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

For well over half a century, Donald Sutherland has been recognized as one of the world’s leading movie actors. Working with such directors as Frederico Fellini, Alan J. Pakula, Oliver Stone, Louis Malle, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Redford, Nicolas Roeg and co-starring with the likes of Jane Fonda, Mary Tyler Moore, Clint Eastwood, Julie Christie, Marlon Brando, Keira Knightley, Jennifer Lawrence, Elliot Gould, Michael Caine and John Belushi, Sutherland’s singular career spans the old Hollywood and the cinematic revolution that began in The Sixties.

In this long-awaited memoir he remembers his complicated Canadian boyhood, his acting studies in the UK, his first international triumph in M.A.S.H., his controversial, headline making anti-Vietnam war activism, his life, loves and family and his celebration by the film community as one of its most venerated and revered performers.

Donald McNichol Sutherland CC is a Canadian prolific actor and anti-war activist. His film career spans over six decades, including starring roles in films such as The Dirty Dozen, M*A*S*H, Klute, Fellini’s Casanova, and many others. Sutherland has received numerous accolades including a Primetime Emmy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, a Critics Choice Award, and an Academy Honorary Award. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) in 1978, a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2012 and received the Companion of the Order of Canada (CC) in 2019.

SITO de Laurence Ralph

This heart-wrenching story of violence, grief and the American justice system, explores the systemic issues that perpetuate gang participation in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, as told through the story of one teenager.

SITO
An American Teenager and the City that Failed Him
by Laurence Ralph
Grand Central, February 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito’s. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on. But for the families of the slain teenagers, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito’s half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth, Sito’s murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a deeply personal way. Written from Ralph’s perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito’s family and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, SITO is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger, and about anger, fear, grief, vengeance, and ultimately grace.

Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he is the Director for the Center on Transnational Policing. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (2014) and The Torture Letters: Reckoning With Police Violence (2020), both published by University of Chicago Press. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER de Gracie Gold

In this explosive tell-all memoir, Gracie Gold, Olympic medalist, offers an unprecedented look inside the pressure-packed world of figure skating and reveals her battle to survive mental illness, eating disorders, and crippling perfectionism.

OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER
A Memoir of Figure Skating, F*cking Up, and Figuring It Out
by Gracie Gold
Crown, February 2024

When Gracie Gold stepped onto center stage (or ice, rather) as America’s sweetheart at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, she instantly became the face of America’s most beloved winter sport. Beautiful, blonde, Midwestern, and media-trained, she was suddenly being written up everywhere from The New Yorker to Teen Vogue to People and baking cookies with Taylor Swift.

But little did the public know what Gracie was facing when the cameras were off. In 2017, she entered treatment for what was publicly announced as eating disorder and anxiety treatment, but what was, in reality, suicidal ideation. While Gracie’s public star was rising, her private life was falling apart: Cracks within her family were widening, her bulimia was getting worse, and she became a survivor of sexual assault. The pressure of training for years with demanding coaches and growing up in a household that accepted nothing less than gold had finally taken its toll. As Gracie entered treatment, she was asked to cite only her eating disorder and anxiety in the announcement: suicidal ideation wasn’t “palatable.”

In OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER, Gracie shares the less “palatable” parts of her life, revealing exclusive, and harrowing, details about her struggles: the battles with her family, her coaches, the powers-that-be at her federation, and the voice in her head that she calls « outofshapeworthlessloser. » Gracie’s memoir is not only a forceful reckoning from a world-class athlete, but also an intimate account of surviving as a young woman in a society that rewards appearances more than anything and demands perfection at all costs.

Gracie Gold is a two-time U.S. figure-skating champion and an Olympic bronze medalist. Gold is the first and only American woman to win an NHK Trophy title and holds the record for the highest short-program score ever recorded by an American woman. Her writing has been published in The Cut. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware, and trains in suburban Philadelphia.

FRIGHTEN THE HORSES d’Oliver Radclyffe

For fans of Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There and Thomas Page McBee, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES is a textured and sharply written queer memoir about coming of age in the fourth decade of one’s life and embracing one’s truest self in a world that wants to fit everyone in neat boxes.

FRIGHTEN THE HORSES
by Oliver Radclyffe
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, September 2024

From the outside, Oliver Radclyffe spent four decades living an immensely privileged, beautifully composed life. As the daughter of two well-to-do British parents and the wife of a handsome, successful man from an equally privileged family, Oliver played the parts expected of him. He checked off every box—marriage, children (four), a white-picket fence surrounding a stately home in Connecticut, and a golden retriever named Biscuit.

But beneath the shiny veneer, Oliver was desperately trying to stay afloat as he struggled to maintain a façade of normalcy—his hair was falling out in large clumps, he couldn’t eat, and his mood swings often brought him to tears. And then, on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon in September, Oliver Radclyffe woke up and realized the life of a trapped housewife was not one he was ever meant to live. In fact, Oliver had spent his entire life denying the deepest, truest parts of himself. In the wake of this realization, he began the challenging, messy journey toward self-acceptance and living a truer life, knowing he risked the life he’d built to do so.

The journey is fraught, as Oliver navigated leaving a marriage and reintroducing himself to his children. And despite the challenges he faced, Oliver realizes there was no way for him to go back to the beautiful lie of his previous life. Not if he wanted to survive. FRIGHTEN THE HORSES is a trans man’s coming of age story, about a housewife who comes out as lesbian and tentatively, at first, steps into the world of queerness. With growing courage and the support of his newfound community, Oliver is finally able to face the question of his gender identity and become the man he is supposed to be. The story of a flawed, fascinating, gorgeously queer man, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES introduces Oliver Radclyffe as a witty, arresting, unforgettable voice.

Oliver Radclyffe is part of the new wave of transgender writers unafraid to address the complex nuances of transition, examining the places where gender identity, sexual orientation, feminist allegiance, social class, and family history overlap. His work has appeared in The New York Times and Electric Literature, and he has a book of essays due for publication in October 2023 with Unbound Edition Press. He currently lives on the Connecticut coast, where he is raising his four children.