Tag: good book. read it, dude

Week 4, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Dr. Robert Sapolsky

· Leave a comment ·

Psychology month!

Week 4, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky

Arguably not a psychology book, I couldn’t help myself. Dr. Sapolsky is a pre-eminent neuroendocrinologist whose research on stress has, since the 1990s, I think dominated the field of stress and trauma.

 Also, he’s extremely readable which tends to be an oft-touted gift in reviews of his work. Sapolsky is a charismatic, humorous guy and it shows in his writing style, even when he’s verbally beating you up about the misconceptions of dopamine over the last few decades.

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, of which I read it’s 3rd edition, was published originally in 1994 and has become a staple for anyone seriously studying stress and its affects on the body, mental health (which, yes, counts as part of your body), as well as the history of how the field of stress has developed through medicine over the last hundred years. Chock full of anecdotes about medical history, a remarkable breadth of knowledge on the subject, the book details what brought Sapolsky into the study of stress and what has, to the date of the most recent edition, been continually found and supported in the research.

Some people, me being one of them, find a lot of comfort understanding and also being able to explain mental health concerns from a medical standpoint. Some people will just not buy in to mindfulness or talk therapy seriously because they feel it’s a new science or there are too many elements of pseudoscience and that especially when dealing with mental illness, it’s easy for others to take advantage. That’s why I appreciate work like Sapolsky’s that provides so much empirical evidence that can be used to validate the importance of talk therapy, mindfulness, medicinal psychotropic therapies. It’s a huge boon to anyone to be able to understand their own bodies and brains better, but also to have that hammer in your back pocket of a wide history of medical research to support yourself as you navigate having a brain and other people who (yes, even that person) also have brains.

Week 3, Making Space; Taming the Tiger Within, Thich Nhat Han

· Leave a comment ·

Psychology Month!

Week 3, Making Space; Taming the Tiger Within, Thich Nhat Han

Mindfulness has been getting a huge spotlight in medicine the last fifteen years but I often worry that it’s clouded by patients dismissively thinking of it as spiritualism. Thich Nhat Han, a Buddhist monk who sadly died last year, was a mindfulness teacher with a wide variety of accessible material who often managed not to fixate on mindfulness or awareness as a spiritual problem but as a human one. 

I was discussing with a friend at lunch recently another friend who has been recommended mindfulness again and again who always says it’s just too unappealing to her–and the friend at lunch burst out ‘but mindfulness is everything! You can’t do anything without doing mindfulness first!’

And, unfortunately, that’s pretty true. Mindfulness practices, like the ones I used to teach (Yep, I’m biased), are not about sitting in silence and not thinking, as the stereotype goes, but about learning to control your own nervous system. So much of mental health: addiction, anxiety, is rooted in not being able to engage in what we call non-striving behaviors. Sleep is a non-striving behaviors, the more you think about and force yourself to sleep, the less success you have switching effectively between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation, for which there is the helpful acronym RIP. Relaxation induced panic.

Not being able to effectively not-strive leads to a huge prediction toward addiction, anxiety, panic attacks, as well as myriad behavioral problems.

 I think Thich Nhat Han delivers a very good methodology of what Mindfulness really is–coming together with yourself, taking control of your own nervous system. Being able to sit with yourself without blotting it out with the noise of everyone else. I have talked to too many people who do not feel their sense of self is stable and who are amazed when nothing changes in their lives without addressing that first.

Making Space is dedicated to how to begin that practice of mindfulness, while Taming the Tiger Within deals specifically with addressing anger. In mindfulness, one of the greatest lessons is being able to sit with anger and embrace anger and appreciation of anger for what it is, without lashing out or causing harm. And it is, like my friend said, the start of everything.

Week 2, Self Compassion, Kristin Neff; Be Calm, Jill Weber

· Leave a comment ·

Psychology month!

Week 2, Self Compassion, Kristin Neff; Be Calm, Jill Weber

Self Compassion: The Proven Power of being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff is a straightforward argument for why being kind to yourself helps you best to be kind to others and to improve how you view and move through life. It highlights the importance of putting the brakes on catastrophic thinking and reactive behaviors. There’s going to be a theme, if you read all of these reviews on Psychology books, of curbing reactive, adaptive behaviors that may have been advantageous to you at one time in your life but aren’t any longer. It’s incredibly hard to unlearn maladaptive behaviors and Neff puts forward the importance of self compassion toward reaching that goal for yourself. Self compassion is touted and supported as being integral to adapting and learning new behavior and Neff is one of the biggest names in general audiences learning to that end.

Be Calm by Jill Weber is, like so many of these, sort of a hybrid between a work book and a psychology book, focused on anxiety. I decided to pair it with the book on self compassion because…..well, duh. You need self compassion to work through anxiety, the good news being that anxiety is extremely responsive to treatment.

This book is a compassionate description of anxiety symptoms, how they impact functioning and relationships, broken down into sections on thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It offers practical guidance on how to curb anxiety stemming from each of these and how they relate to one another.

Week 1, Us, Terrence Real; Attachment Theory Workbook for Couples, Elizabeth Gillette 

· Leave a comment ·

Psychology month! —

Week 1, Us, Terrence Real; Attachment Theory Workbook for Couples, Elizabeth Gillette 

For June (my birfday month) I’ve decided to focus on Psychology books which I’d recommend, beginning with Us by Terrence Real. Real is a couples counseling specialist and makes the argument for relational therapy, a methodology he’s developed to address interpersonal relationships by focusing heavily on inner child work; examining core values and problems which lead to poor communication and behavior with others. There is a straight forward, no nonsense approach on how to bring people from states of harmony and disharmony into repair through compassion.

Real breaks his concept down by discussing how, by living in a patriarchal society, we have created a culture of rugged individualism which becomes toxic as we reject help or assistance, relying instead on our own adaptive behaviors rooted in childhood. Many people reject relational thinking–thinking of and for others, even when it works against their best interest to do so, because it’s seen as anti-individual. People default to thinking of their own traumas, interests, or adaptive behaviors, reacting rather than relating to their current experiences.

Real makes an important point to note that in our individualist, capitalist society, someone can be praised for relying on adaptive behaviors and behaviors which discourage seeking help or assistance—-that a person can have an amazing work life, friend life,  inner life while not understanding why their relationships are failing. The short answer is it’s because your coworkers and employers benefit from your toxic individualism (not making a fuss, not asking for help, not communicating personal problems, internalizing blame and conflict, taking aggressive action against perceived problems), while the people who love you are scrambling to get you to pay attention or to think of their perspectives.

Disharmony is of course to be expected in life. Individuals coming together to live in units and relationships, romantic or not, are going to experience conflict. It’s inevitable. The most important feature of any relationship is how you repair from conflict, if you can repair from conflict.

A second couples counseling book, or really a book that could benefit interpersonal relationships, which I’d recommend is The Attachment Theory Workbook for Couples by Elizabeth Gillette.  The book is broken down into describing each of the main attachment styles, giving examples for readers to best identity themselves and their partner, as well as individual sections on how each combination of those attachment styles interacts with one another with examples; all sections providing questions for reflection designed to increase empathy. Gillette gives a clear set of expectations for the strengths and weaknesses of each pairing and how they could best succeed. It’s a very straight forward, ways to digest work book that describes attachment theory very well for general audiences.

Review: The Mayor of Macdougall Street

· Leave a comment ·

I like Dave Van Ronk. I have forever. Still, the book took me forever to read. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, I very much did, but because, as always, Dave Van Ronk is surprising.

I wasn’t expecting a chapter devoted to anarchy, activism, or the confiscation  of the term and re-appropriation of libertarian-ism quite so early on. This was stupid of me. I know who Dave Van Ronk is, after all. And I know he had things to say.

My favorite answer to that question is: Dave Van Ronk was a folk singer who was out to dinner the night of the Stonewall Riots, saw people throwing bricks and heard the commotion, and excused himself from the table to join. Famously quoted, “…I figured, they can’t have a riot without me!”

If for whatever reason you doubt Van Ronk’s intelligence, you needn’t. Everything discussed shows a highly intelligent, curious, thoughtful man who carefully plodded through his politics and his craft. These are perhaps his two most comfortable topics. He, like so many men laboring against patriarchy long before it was popular or even a term, runs into that barrier of having to define what patriarchy is without many allies. He knows that there is injustice, that he seems to be somehow benefit from the status quo, yet he wants to raise up the others around him. He believed in true equality —which is goddamn hard when you’re getting started in the 1950s as if it isn’t still hard today.

There’s a cancer of hyper individualism that sees people with amazing work lives or intellectual lives who have very turbulent personal lives. Van Ronk is one of them, a proud race of people trying to navigate the society he’s in and the values he has.

Also, his descriptions of music and honing his skill leaves me jealous. He was someone who put his head down and learned, meticulously, leaning heavily on the influences around him to be a school and not something he merely took from. 

Review: Remarkably Bright Creatures

· Leave a comment ·

The debut novel from Shelby Van Pelt, I’d seen an article talking about Remarkably Bright Creatures shortly after it was published , talking about the unexpected nature of the book and how it had come together. It was stuck like a burr in the back of my hair, something to look out for.

I had forgotten about it for a bit so when I had the opportunity to read it, it was a surprise. Like finding a missing key.

How appropriate, then, that the whole novel centers around small discoveries and their importance, finding things lost you’d not known were missing.

I found the book a bit slow at times, I had thought. Then I checked my tracking app and found I’d read it in two days. I thought it had been longer, and in part that’s because of how immersive the characterization and set description is.

Carefully crafted and laid, the book is lovingly written with characters that come alive, even those that go from obnoxious to well rounded through the course of the narrative. All of this is punctuated with a Greek chorus of Marcellus, an octopus, describing events as he witnesses them from his tank at the aquarium where many of the human characters lives intersect.

The book is charming, and despite seeming simple at it’s outset it was incredibly sentimental and sweet.

Review: Keep Moving

· Leave a comment ·

I seem to be following a pattern, or I’m being pulled by an algorithm, where I read Carrie Fisher then Penny Marshall, then Carl Reiner, and now I’m on Dick Van Dyke. It’s like a game of memoir telephone.

This was a real ‘well why not’ read; coming out in 2015, Keep Moving hits on that same vein I’ve seen in a lot of the memoirs I’ve read. Happy people live longer.

Keep Moving summarizes Dick Van Dyke’s main advice; the book is an exploration of how he’s managed to live well into his 90s: a combination of optimism, changing habits when you have to, and never settling down. Perhaps it’s because I finished the book the morning of writing this, but the chapter lingering most in my brain is his conversation with Carl Reiner. Several times in the book Van Dyke considers at what point you feel old. He asks the people around him. He asks Reiner. Reiner says there wasn’t a specific time. The problem, the same problem Van Dyke describes, is that he doesn’t know when or how he got old; he was too busy. He supposes when he feels old is when he wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror and sees the evidence. But in terms of feeling old? It never occurred to him. It never occurs to Van Dyke. There’s too much to do.

Van Dyke also talks a decent amount about challenging ageism. If someone isn’t capable it’s not because of a number of years, it’s no different than anyone contracting illness or physical impairments, it’s only more likely. I have a friend in disability advocacy who ends every presentation she does on cerebral palsy , which she has; “Remember, I’m a member of the only minority group that anyone can join.” It’s an important reminder that you’re gambling with how you will be treated yourself

Vonnegut, part 2

· Leave a comment ·

I have more to say about Vonnegut.

These reviews are posted somewhat out of order. From time to time I delve into a specific writer, and I have done so with Vonnegut a few times throughout my life.

I read Slaughter House Five a few times in coursework; in both highschool and a college course on Wartime literature. When Vonnegut died I was in college. I turned, in a panic, to a roommate who reported that she didn’t know who Kurt Vonnegut was. The conversation haunted me then and now. I am not afraid to say he’s my favorite author though I hate that kind of commitment.

Here are the books I’ve reread by Vonnegut this year:

Cat’s Cradle

Man Without a Country

Books kitty-corner to Vonnegut I’ve read this year:

If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?

Love, Kurt

Pity the Reader

I also wrote a story story called “Book on Tape” where I have a conversation presumably with Vonnegut. The character has Vonnegut’s history and some features but it’s not actually about Vonnegut at all. And the character that uses Vonnegut like a mask isn’t based on Vonnegut at all. Vonnegut isn’t in the story for a single moment but it’s sculpted in a way to make the general population think it’s Vonnegut. I did it because it’s a story, much as Vonnegut suggests you write, written to one person and one person only. Only one person can read that short story and know that the conversation I’m having is with them. I’ve been thinking of it as a love letter and am vaguely ashamed I used Vonnegut in that way.

I’m going to be very presumptuous and familiar and upsetting in that this isn’t really about Kurt Vonnegut at all. I think Vonnegut is my favorite writer because he’s saved my life more than once. I have a very blunted view of him as a man, a perhaps inflated view of him as a writer, but I think he provides a familiarity. He writes a bit how my father talks, he reminds me of a friend I miss, I have another friend I miss who had tattoos of Vonnegut’s doodles and who has since passed. Vonnegut, like Edward Gorey, has an indelible mark throughout my life through various touchstones.

And lately I’ve needed him. I’ve needed that amalgam old friend to lean on.

“Love, Kurt” —a collection of love letters collected by his eldest daughter Edith sent to her mother, (prior to her parent’s divorce, of course,) describing a side of the man that isn’t satirical, competing with himself to prove his intelligence, or the presented pose he contrived. It’s full of doodles, his name in bubble letters checkerboarded, hearts, constant self doubts, frustrations, and attempts again and again to put feelings into words that he actively avoided putting into novels. Vonnegut felt any manner of romance ruined a novel because love is so much more important to humans than any plot. Once there was romance in a story the story became the romance, and the story ends when they kiss.

In a commencement speech documented in “If this Isn’t Nice, What Is?” Vonnegut suggests, if you find yourself in marital trouble, the trouble isn’t likely sex or money or how to raise a kid, but that the problem in every marriage is that each partner too often looks at the other and is hurt/disappointed/angered that they are only one person. You want your partner to be the world and you lose sight of the singular person that they are. I read it suggested in an article that the reason his marriage to Jane ultimately failed was because he looked at her as a character he had come up with, and that he had become her character just the same. She had been the one to continuously push him as he repeatedly gave up and pursued a wide variety of day jobs, always thinking that writing would just be a hobby. His success ultimately created the rift between them because they were confronted with the truth that they weren’t the characters they’d been playing for each other.

Admittedly, this is what made me go looking through folders to find old notes and love letters from my partner. If you have any things like that laying around, go find them.

My favorite thing Vonnegut wrote, two things I should say, were highlighted in “Pity the Reader”. The first was a letter written home, the first letter written home after he had been liberated in Dresden. The first letter he had sent home to let everyone know that he was alive. There is something so glib and his voice is already so clear then as he reports what has happened and why he’s been missing and how he’s doing at the moment. It’s so clear and evocative a letter that I have no problem seeing him sitting on the cot writing it.

The second, also in “Pity the Reader” is a long form contract he has written to his wife Jane as she is pregnant, detailing all of the things he is willing to do for her, clean for her, arrange for her, and the amount of swearing he’s going to attempt to refrain from while he does it.

I think in those two pieces you get most of what you need to know about Vonnegut the person, outside of Vonnegut the author. You get bluntness, unapologetic honesty, humor, adoration, and resilience.

Review: Juniper and Thorn

· Leave a comment ·

Juniper and Thorn is a fast paced and engrossing book billed as a retelling of The Juniper Tree. I wasn’t actually familiar with The Juniper Tree and sought out the fairy tale; I find that a lot of fantasy recently has been reviving the Brothers Grimm. Once I read it I did vaguely recall: 

A kindly man and woman, unable to have a child, do so through apple-magic, as one does. The wife promptly has a baby and dies, as one does. The wicked stepmother comes in and has her own child who she wants to inherit the father’s estate and so she lures her stepson to look into a crate then slams the lid down decapitating him, as one does. 

In a fit of just unusual cruelness, she then reassembles him, props him up, and encourages her daughter to go ask him for an apple. The daughter does, he’s suspiciously not listening, step mom gives a good ol’ “Whack him!”, the daughter does, and his head falls off.

You know.

The daughter, deeply distraught about her brother’s death, gathers up the dismembered parts and puts him back together while attempting to give him a proper burial beneath a juniper tree. Oh, I forgot to mention the stepmother also tricked her husband into eating some of the corpse. You know.

The boy gets transformed into a bird, he drops a millstone on the stepmother, he turns back into a boy, everyone has lunch. You mother’s dead, you’re brother is a revenant, time for Red Lobster.

Reid cleans this up a bit into a love story involving deceiving fathers and the necessity of being a bit monstrous to overcome them. Within the greater novel this myth serves as a backbone both in ways reflecting themes of the narrative and serving as the inspiration for the ballet in which Sevas, the male lead, performs.

Outside of that inspiration, the story is a well constructed fairy tale inspired by Russian, Jewish, German cultures that has that childhood-fantasy nostalgic allure while keeping things R rated. I really enjoyed it, much like I did The Wolf and the Woodsman (read the review here: https://aliactast.com/2022/03/18/review-the-wolf-and-the-woodsman/) , also by Reid and taking place in the same fantasy world building.

I found Juniper and Thorn to be a tighter narrative than Woodsman that focused singularly on the characters and their progression through the story, letting you be thrust into the world rather than taking the time to linger on world building. That said it’s very much a stand alone story which holds its own weight, I appreciated being thrown in rather than having my hand held. 

I’m continuing to really like Reid’s writing style and now I’ll have to hunt for what’s next.

Review: Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life

· Leave a comment ·

I remember a copy of Cruel Shoes that belonged to my father sitting on the bookshelf and feeling compelled to read it–in large part because my father hates Comedians. My father does not trade in Comedy, that’s my mother’s sole business, so it always struck me that Steve Martin must be somehow special.

I remember Cruel Shoes very vaguely because I was a lot younger when I read it and I remember it as sort of a sparse humorous collection of jokes or bits. It wasn’t very memorable for me, I’m sorry to say, more memorable that my father owned it.

Given my partner’s own predilection for Steve Martin, and this errant book on the shelf, I always sort of assume some mythic quality to Steve Martin. Reading Born Standing Up it is a much more genuine look at him, his career, and what informs his choices—not just throwing up jokes as a deflection. At one point after discussing his father Martin notes that if you’re required to experience pain and abuse in order to get into comedy as a business, you need not worry about his qualifications.

The book was very somber and honest, detailing how ideas were developed as well as panic attacks and hypochondria, not lingering on any one problem but always moving forward to the next thing, the next bit, which I’ve found to be a pattern in the memoirs of funny people.

I think that’s the real lesson to come away from an honest, relatively short blip of a book. Steve Martin knows his limits and what could drag him down, then turns and walks in the opposite direction.