It is deeply satisfying that in this golden age of brain research, memoirists, journalists, science geeks and psychologists are writing at the intersection of neuroscience and human emotion. Today, I have two new books about the brain and the body that will be published next month and a classic that should occupy a place on your shelf.
Florence Williams’ marriage was faltering – she knew that. But when she saw incontrovertible proof that her husband’s affections lay elsewhere, she was flattened by heartbreak but also, as a science journalist, intrigued with how her brain and body were absorbing the shock. Williams’ new book, “Heartbreak,” is part memoir, part scientific investigation as she reaches out to researchers, visits laboratories, dropping into the Heartbreak Hotel at the University of Colorado, and embarks on adventures into nature to heal her bruised heart. She writes: “I set out to experiment on myself to see if I could understand the way heartbreak changes our neurons, our bodies and our sense of
ourselves.”
My second book about human emotion and the brain is Mary-Frances O’Connor’s “The Grieving Brain.” O’Connor is a psychologist and director of the Grief, Loss and Social Stress Lab at the University of Arizona. Her new book examines what happens in the brain when we are grieving, why it takes so long to accept that the loss is permanent and how the scientific research on grief is evolving and maturing. She writes in the introduction: “Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning and seeing grieving as learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable.”
My last book on the brain and the study of it is by the late neuroscientist Oliver Sacks. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," published in 1986, is a collection of elegant, introspective essays about the neurological mysteries that Dr. Sacks encountered in decades of treating patients. The writing is wise and full of wonder for the brain’s complexity and Sacks’ voice is warm and compassionate. “With the rise of neuroscience and all its wonders,” Sacks writes, “it is even more important now to preserve the personal narrative, to see every patient as a unique being with his own history and strategies for adapting and surviving.”
Also coming up next Friday: Catch my book show interview with Nafida Mohamed and the riveting story of the last man hanged in Cardiff Prison. You can hear it at noon.
Ivan Maisel lost his 21-year-old son to suicide in 2015. It was a shattering moment. But Maisel and his wife had no choice but to go on living without Max. In “I Keep Trying to Catch Your Eye,” Maisel chronicles his journey through grief.
It would have been easy for the legendary reporter Carl Bernstein to fall into the nostalgia trap with his new book, which chronicles his earliest years in the newspaper business. Happily, he doesn't. While it's a mostly fond look at the past, he deftly avoids all the "things sure were better back then" pitfalls.
In Nigerian culture, "Wahala" means trouble. In Nikki May's sharply observed debut novel, "Wahala," trouble's name is Isobel, the new girl who shakes up the equilibrium in a tight group of Anglo-Nigerian friends.
Graphic novelist Henry Barajas is finding success by incorporating Mesoamerican history — and his own family's past — into his work. In his latest, Barajas depicts characters he never really saw in The Lord of the Rings or the game Dungeons and Dragons, some of his favorites growing up.
Over the last two years, many have experienced a kind of ambiguous loss as we have lived with isolation and uncertainty in the pandemic. Author and therapist Pauline Boss explains how to move forward.
After working for the Obama administration for two years, Penn returned to Hollywood in 2011 and played White House press secretary Seth Wright in the ABC series Designated Survivor and a former New York City councilman on the NBC sitcom Sunnyside. His new memoir is a collection of stories about his life and career.
Jean Chen Ho's debut work of fiction focuses on a long-standing friendship that rings, sometimes terribly, true as the girls-turned-women face the trials and tribulations of life.
"Lost & Found" is as much a philosophical reckoning with the experiences of losing and finding as it is a record of New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz's personal grief and love stories. It is that philosophical turning over of loss and discovery that makes this memoir extraordinary, for it unlocks existential meaning out of the utterly mundane facts of human life.
