An innovative hybrid of memoir and fiction, Noboku is kind of like Call Me By Your Name, but the two main characters are women, and it's set in Japan.Nobuko is based on author Trisha Ready's experiences teaching English in the 1980s in Japan, where she fell for a woman who lived in a rustic cabin and made dentures for a living. A twisting maze of subplots involve the yakuza, the Japanese organized crime syndicate -- as well as food, art, adventure, samurai swords, and marriage....

Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering: Trauma, History, and Memory offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives that highlight the problem of traumatic memory. Because trauma fragments memory, storytelling is impeded by what is unknowable and what is unspeakable. Each of the contributors tackles the problem of narrativizing memory that is constructed from fragments that have been passed along the generations. When trauma is cultural as well as personal, it becomes ev...

Music in Therapeutic Practice: Using Rhythm to Bridge Communication Barriers builds upon an emerging awareness in psychotherapy that music can create therapeutic rapport with patients. Music has been described as our first language, beginning with our mother’s heartbeat. Early rhythms echo and elaborate as themes threading through the narratives of our emotional lives. Given the ways we can access and share music today, we find ourselves increasingly maneuvering through musical landscapes ...

'A passionate defence of the enduring power of human nature ... both life-affirming and deeply satisfying' Daily TelegraphRecently many people have assumed that we are blank slates shaped by our environment. But this denies the heart of our being: human nature. Violence is not just a product of society; male and female minds are different; the genes we give our children shape them more than our parenting practices. To acknowledge our inna...

A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone.From John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates. Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society—and especially parents—to transform them from little sociopaths into civilized beings. In Just Babies, Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardw...

Psychologists have long believed that we begin life as moral blank slates. Most of us take it for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society - and especially parents - to transform them from little sociopaths into civilised beings. Now, in Just Babies, Paul Bloom argue that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. Drawing on groundbreaking research, Bloom demonstrates that even before they can speak or walk, babies judge the goodness and ...

Preeminent psychologist Lisa Barrett lays out how the brain constructs emotions in a way that could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind.“Fascinating . . . A thought-provoking journey into emotion science.”—The Wall Street Journal“A singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are presented.”—Scientific American“A brilliant and original book on the sc...

Now available in paperback?a provocative new look at biology, evolution, and human behavior ?as disturbing [as it is] fascinating? (Publishers Weekly).Why are most neurosurgeons male and most kindergarten teachers female? Why aren?t there more women on death row? Why do so many male politicians ruin their careers with sex scandals? Why and how do we really fall in love? This engaging book uses the latest research from the field of evolutionary psychology t...

Child prodigies. Gifted and Talented Programs. Perfect 2400s on the SAT. Sometimes it feels like the world is conspiring to make the rest of us feel inadequate. Those children tapped as possessing special abilities will go on to achieve great things, while the rest of us have little chance of realizing our dreams. Right?In Ungifted, cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman -- who was relegated to special education as a child -- sets out to show that the way we interpret ...

A book that challenges common misconceptions about the nature of intelligenceSatoshi Kanazawa's Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (written with Alan S. Miller) was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a rollicking bit of pop science that turns the lens of evolutionary psychology on issues of the day." That book answered such burning questions as why women tend to lust after males who already have mates and why newborns look more like Dad tha...

Homer’s great epic of a hero’s journey home—inspiration for the major motion picture by Christopher Nolan—in a bold, contemporary, and refreshingly readable translation."Wilson’s language is fresh, unpretentious and lean. . . . It is rare to find a translation that is at once so effortlessly easy to read and so rigorously considered." —Madeline Miller, author of CirceComposed at the rosy-fingered dawn of world literature almost thr...

A New York Times Notable Book: A psychologist's "gripping and thought-provoking" look at how and why our brains sometimes fail us (Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works).In this intriguing study, Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter explores the memory miscues that occur in everyday life, placing them into seven categories: absent-mindedness, transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Illustrating these concepts w...