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The Japanese term meibutsu refers to things of the highest cultural value, evolving over time to encompass both craft and fine art, high and low culture, and manufactured and natural items.
Material goods designated as meibutsu range from precious art objects to regional products like bamboo baskets and ceramics.
“Exemplary Things” traces the history of this epistemic classificatory system in Japanese culture from its elite origins in the fifteenth century to its commercial appropriation today.
Our ability to live for decades may seem like a modern luxury made possible by clean water and advances in medicine. In fact, human longevity is a legacy of our unique evolutionary path as a species. “Seven Decades” challenges the belief that life in the past was “nasty, brutish, and short,” tracing how our capacity for long life came to be and transforming how we think about aging.
Blending vivid storytelling with cutting-edge science, anthropologist Michael Gurven weaves tales from his years of field experience among Indigenous societies whose diet and traditional lifeways are closer to how we all lived prior to industrialization, demonstrating how these communities are relatively free of the chronic diseases of aging such as heart disease, dementia, and diabetes.
He provides compelling evidence that our longevity first evolved among our hunting and gathering ancestors and shows how the human body was built to last around seven decades.
Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body’s buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soaring over Canadian waterfalls on dark mornings before beginning her daily scientific research.
As an astronaut candidate, dreaming of the experience of flying free from Earth’s pull. And as a physicist, discovering new sides to gravity’s irresistible personality by exploring the limits of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
In “The Beauty of Falling,” de Rham shares captivating stories about her quest to gain intimacy with gravity, to understand both its feeling and fundamental nature.
Author: Alex Michaelides
A psychological thriller about a woman accused of murdering her husband and remaining completely silent for more than six years, and of her eager new psychotherapist, “The Silent Patient” by Alex Michaelides invites readers to explore another’s psyche while reflecting on our own.
The 2019 novel unfolds through two perspectives. Alicia Berenson, the thoughtful artist at the center of the case, speaks through her diary, written in the weeks leading up to her husband’s death. It details her upbringing, marriage, and career during a period of unstable inspiration.
Theo Faber, a new psychotherapist at The Grove, leaves a prestigious London psychiatric hospital to join what many consider a sinking ship. He is driven purely by his obsession with Berenson’s case. He is fascinated by her past.
A true Freudian, Faber believes that adult traits and behaviors are shaped largely by childhood experiences. This theme runs throughout the book, both in Faber’s attempt to unlock Berenson’s mind and explain her silence and in the unraveling of his own life and marriage.
This book’s grip on the reader is almost criminal: You turn the pages hunting for answers and analyses, testing your own loyalties, and questioning what is real. Maybe you’ll place your trust in Faber. May you’ll suspect everyone else in Berenson’s life, painting her as lonely as she painted herself.
And maybe you’ll think again, and again.
Berenson’s only communication after the “incident” is a self-portrait titled “Alcestis,” inspired by Euripides’ play. The painting shows her standing before a blank canvas, holding a paintbrush dripping with red paint, her expression blank, mouth open yet silent, staring directly at the viewer.
With its layered psychology and mythic undertones, “The Silent Patient” leaves the reader haunted long after the final page. Michaelides is also the author of “The Maidens” and “The Fury.”
In her elegant essay collection, “Lessons for Survival,” Emily Raboteau confronts climate collapse, societal breakdown and the COVID-19 pandemic while trying to raise children in a responsible way.
Award-winning author and critic Raboteau uses the lens of motherhood to craft a powerfully moving meditation on race, climate, environmental justice — and what it takes to find shelter.
Lessons for Survival is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises.
The book was written very well and about topics “we all should be aware of, especially in the times we are living in,” said a review on goodreads.com.
The strength of her book is her willingness to express concerns that many feel but are reluctant to voice.
Lessons for Survival stitches together multiple stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.
“The book is deep, and clearly well researched, as Raboteau puts emphasis on a lot of topics many people would rather brush under the rug.”
How did the world as we know it — from the soil beneath our feet to the air we breathe and the life that surrounds us — come to be? Geologists have proposed one set of answers while biologists have proposed another.
“Earth and Life” is the first book to reveal why we need to listen to both voices — the physical and the biological — to understand how we and our planet became possible.
In this captivating book, Andrew Knoll traces how all life is sustained by Earth’s geological and atmospheric dynamics, and how life itself shapes the physical environment.
