Stolen Focus (Johann Hari, 2023)
review coming soon
The Making of a Therapist (Louis Cozolino, 2004)
review to come
The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel van der Kolk, 2014)
Bessel van de Kolk once received a request to help me find an internship. Or at least, that’s what I was told. No internship came of it, in the end. This was around 2014, and I guess one reason for not responding was that he was busy finishing this book – which bears the title…
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Lori Gottlieb, 2019)
A therapist memoir where we get to follow the therapist as practitioner, but also as a client in therapy herself – which is an unusual setup for this kind of book. The subtitle is “a therapist, her therapist and our lives revealed”. It seems to me that the book does a pretty good job of…
Comedy Book (Jesse David Fox, 2023)
Comedy book is a rare project, an updated nonfiction book about stand up comedy and its position in culture today. Most books on the topic are shticky novelty efforts, but this one takes its topic seriously – without being boring. In the vein of comedy nestor Kliph Nesteroff, culture critic Jesse David Fox has written…
Alphamaniacs (Paul Fleischman, 2020)
Alphamaniacs is a fun book for all linguistically inclined readers! It is structured around 26 short bios of language innovators (why 26? One for every letter of the English alphabet). The selection spans from blink-writer Jean-Dominique Bauby to Ludvik Zamenhof, the founder of Esperanto. There is an emphasis on the playful, which is reflected in…
Les bagages de sable (Anna Langfus, 1962)
Anna Langfus is a forgotten writer; to the extent that she’s remembered at all, it’s as the recipient of the Goncourt prize of 1962, for Les Bagages de sable. She was a refugee from the second world war, who grew up in a Jewish family in Lublin, Poland. She survived by adopting the identity of…
Racée (Rachel Khan, 2021)
Racé is the word Khan invents to counteract racisé and racialisé. The English word for the latter is racialized, which came into common parlance in America about 15-20 years ago. But Khan is not American, she’s French, and she has her own ideas on how to tackle questions of race. She want to push back…
La voix du terroriste (Claude Kayat, 2023)
This book by fascinating writer Claude Kayat can be seen as a meditation on the current state of identity and the shifting kinship and enmity between different faith groups. The setup is shockingly direct; during a deadly terrorist attack and hostage situation in a Paris synagogue, the terrorists inexplicably let one of their key hostages…
House of Glass (Hadley Freeman, 2020)
Longtime journalist at the Guardian Hadley Freeman (since then moved to the Sunday Times) has covered topics of pop culture, politics and feminism. She had the idea to write this book for 20 years, but never knew how to start. She first wanted to write about her grandmother, but then expanded it to include all…
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Kinship of all Species 