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"Erasing the awe-inspiring variety of sentient life impoverishes all our lives," Joanna Bourke wrote in her fascinating chronicle of our understanding of what it means to be human, an awareness inextricably entwined with a parallel understanding of the animal experience of our fellow sentient beings. Jon Mooallem put it even more poignantly in his beautiful and bittersweet meditation on the fate of wildlife today: "Maybe you have to believe in the value of everything to believe in the value of anything." And yet how readily we, as a civilization and as individuals, stop believing in the value of that awe-inspiring variety of sentient life.

Hardly anyone has addressed this disquieting cultural tendency with more dimension than John Berger, best-known for his brilliant 1972 critique of consumer culture, Ways of Seeing. In his essay "Why Look at Animals?," part of the altogether fantastic 1980 anthology About Looking (public library), Berger examines the evolution of our relationship with animals and how they went from muses for the very first human art, as cave men and women adorned their stone walls with drawings of animals painted with animal blood, to spiritual deities to captive entertainment.

He opens with a poetic reminder of how it all began:

To suppose that animals first entered the human imagination as meat or leather or horn is to project a 19th century attitude backwards across the millennia. Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises. For example, the domestication of cattle did not begin as a simple prospect of milk and meat. Cattle had magical functions, sometimes oracular, sometimes sacrificial. And the choice of a given species as magical, tameable and alimentary was originally determined by the habits, proximity and "invitation" of the animal in question.

But there was also something else that drew us closer to our fellow beings as they went from our bonfires to our backyards to our beds - some other kind of singular comfort they offered. As any devoted pet-parent (to use a term rather telling in itself) can attest, a big part of what makes those bonds so intimate is the unconditional affection pets provide, a lack of conditions largely premised on their inability to speak, to talk back, in our human language, coupled with their capacity to speak directly to the soul. Berger writes:

With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species. Such an unspeaking companionship was felt to be so equal that often one finds the conviction that it was man who lacked the capacity to speak with animals - hence the stories and legends of exceptional beings, like Orpheus, who could talk with animals in their own language.

Berger adds:

What were the secrets of the animal's likeness with, and unlikeness from man? The secrets whose existence man recognized as soon as he intercepted an animal's look.

In one sense the whole of anthropology, concerned with the passage from nature to culture, is an answer to that question.

The spiritual quality of that animal gaze, Berger reminds us, stretches much further back than the age of domestication - animals comprise eight of the twelve ancient signs of the zodiac, and the Greeks signified each of the twelve clock-hours of the day with an animal. But that representational capacity was also precisely what separated us from other animals:

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

Berger cites Aristotle's History of Animals, considered the first scientific work on the subject, in which the legendary philosopher anthropomorphizes animals by suggesting that they carry traces of our "human qualities and attitudes," such as "fierceness, mildness or cross-temper, courage or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirits or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something akin to sagacity." That anthropomorphism, rooted in our systematic use of the animal as a metaphor, continued up until the 19th century. Berger laments:

In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them. And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy.

Berger goes on to trace how animals went from caves to carts to cages. The Industrial Revolution gave us the internal combustion engine, which displaced draught animals from both streets and factories. But while this was undoubtedly an upgrade for both animal rights and human productivity, removing animals from our view was detrimental to our sense of shared everyday reality. Meanwhile, as urbanization and industrialization spread, the extinction of wildlife continued removing animals from that reality - more than that, it forcibly denied them the chance to share it with us and instead confined them to the artificial reality of the zoo. Berger draws an unsettling parallel:

This reduction of the animal, which has a theoretical as well as economic history, is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units. Indeed, during this period an approach to animals often prefigured an approach to man.

Alongside this cultural change emerged another significant shift - the rise of pets, which Virginia Woolf's nephew argued were an extension of human fashion and vanity. Noting that at the time of his writing the United States was home to an estimated 40 million dogs, 40 million cats, 15 million cage birds and 10 million other pets, Berger contextualizes our compulsion for domestic animal companionship:

The practice of keeping animals regardless of their usefulness, the keeping, exactly, of pets (in the 16th century the word usually referred to a lamb raised by hand) is a modern innovation, and, on the social scale on which it exists today, is unique. It is part of that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small family unit, decorated or furnished with mementoes from the outside world, which is such a distinguishing feature of consumer societies.

[...]

Equally important is the way the average owner regards his pet. (Children are, briefly, somewhat different.) The pet completes him, offering responses to aspects of his character which would otherwise remain unconfirmed. He can be to his pet what he is not to anybody or anything else. Furthermore, the pet can be conditioned to react as though it, too, recognizes this. The pet offers its owner a mirror to a part that is otherwise never reflected. But, since in this relationship the autonomy of both parties has been lost (the owner has become the-special-man-he-is-only-to-his-pet, and the animal has become dependent on its owner for every physical need), the parallelism of their separate lives has been destroyed.

But beneath this spiritual role of pets in completing the human self lies a darker dynamic, one in which the notion of caretaking becomes an imbalance of power. Berger writes:

In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.

That dynamic was even more pronounced in the public zoo - a 19th-century innovation that came into existence as animals began to disappear from our daily lives. Emerging as an emblem of colonial power, where the capturing of animals became a trophy in the conquest of exotic lands, the zoo changed not only our relationship with animals, but also our very language. Berger cites the London Zoo Guide:

About 1867, a music hall artist called the Great Vance sang a song called Walking in the zoo is the OK thing to do, and the word 'zoo' came into everyday use. London Zoo also brought the word 'Jumbo' into the English language. Jumbo was an African elephant of mammoth size, who lived at the zoo between 1865 and 1882. Queen Victoria took an interest in him and eventually he ended his days as the star of the famous Barnum circus which travelled through America - his name living on to describe things of giant proportions.

Berger poignantly observes:

The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man.

But perhaps the most bittersweet reflection on the changing role of animals in our lives comes from the domain of children - the same observation that sparked Jon Mooallem's ode to wildlife as he watched his little girl play with stuffed animals the real versions of which would be extinct by the time she grew up. Berger writes:

Children in the industrialized world are surrounded by animal imagery: toys, cartoons, pictures, decorations of every sort. No other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals. The apparently spontaneous interest that children have in animals might lead one to suppose that this has always been the case. Certainly some of the earliest toys (when toys were unknown to the vast majority of the population) were animal. Equally, children's games, all over the world, include real or pretended animals. Yet it was not until the 19th century that reproductions of animals became a regular part of the decor of middle class childhoods - and then, in this century, with the advent of vast display and selling systems like Disney's - of all childhoods.

(Perhaps MoMA curator Juliet Kinchin put it best in her design history of childhood, where she observed that "children help us to mediate between the ideal and the real" - and nowhere is the disconnect between the two more dramatic than in children's animal toys.)

Returning to the zoo, where animals have become isolated from each other and deprived of interaction between species, where they have come to rely helplessly on their keepers for survival, Berger draws yet another chilling parallel between the animal experience and human culture:

All sites of enforced marginalization - ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps - have something in common with zoos. But it is both too easy and too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol. The zoo is a demonstration of the relations between man and animals; nothing else. The marginalization of animals is today being followed by the marginalization and disposal of the only class who, throughout history, has remained familiar with animals and maintained the wisdom which accompanies that familiarity: the middle and small peasant. The basis of this wisdom is an acceptance of the dualism at the very origin of the relation between man and animal. The rejection of this dualism is probably an important factor in opening the way to modern totalitarianism.

The zoo, then, fulfills Joanna Bourke's admonition and by marginalizing and impoverishing the lives of animals, it does the same to our own. Berger concludes:

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention. Therein lies the ultimate consequence of their marginalization... This historic loss, to which zoos are a monument, is now irredeemable for the culture of capitalism.

About Looking is well worth a read in its entirety. Complement it with Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, one of the best science books of 2013, then revisit these favorite books about animals.

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Why Look at Animals: John Berger on What Our Relationship with Our Fellow Beings Reveals About Us

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"Erasing the awe-inspiring variety of sentient life impoverishes all our lives," Joanna Bourke wrote in her fascinating chronicle of our understanding of what it means to be human, an awareness inextricably entwined with a parallel understanding of the animal experience of our fellow sentient beings.

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How Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea Subverts Racism (But Not Sexism) | Tor.com

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How Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea Subverts Racism (But Not Sexism) | Tor.com

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This week, Saga Press releases a gorgeous new omnibus edition of Ursula K. Le Guin's Books of Earthsea, illustrated by Charles Vess, in celebration of A Wizard of Earthsea 's 50th anniversary. In honor of that anniversary, this week we're running a different look at Earthsea each day-starting with the first book in the series.

"A great many white readers in 1967 were not ready to accept a brown-skinned hero," Ursula Le Guin wrote in 2012 in an afterword to A Wizard of Earthsea, forty-four years after the seminal novel-the first in the Earthsea cycle-was published. "But they weren't expecting one," she continued. "I didn't make an issue of it, and you have to be well into the book before you realize that Ged, like most of the characters, isn't white."

That Ged, the novel's protagonist, was nonwhite did, however, create consternation for the book's cover, as Le Guin noted in her afterword. It was one thing to write a brown character; it was another to have the audacity to request one appear on the cover. Perhaps out of the fear that seeing a brown figure would deter readers-African-American sci-fi writers were similarly told, for decades, that there was no market for their work, as black people, their publishers presumed, did not read sci-fi, and white readers might similarly be turned off-Ged was repeatedly depicted as "lily-white" on many of the book's covers. To Le Guin's joyous relief, the book's original cover features an illustration by Ruth Robbins, in which Ged, faintly resembling a figure from either a medieval painting or Art Deco, has a soft "copper-brown" complexion. It was "the book's one true cover," she said fondly.

A Wizard of Earthsea was riveting, yet conventional-except in the important way that its main characters quietly subverted one of British and American fantasy's most notable tropes, in which white, often Europeanesque figures are the presumptive standard. Heroic characters in sci-fi or fantasy who looked like me-brown or black, hair tightly curled-seemed strange, impossible, like the dreams of a forgotten circus tent. While the novel's female characters left something to be desired-as Le Guin herself acknowledged in the afterword-its embrace of brown and black figures as protagonists was revolutionary for its time, particularly in a decade in which a fiercely divided America found itself embroiled in tense, often bloody debates over civil rights for black Americans.

I came to the Earthsea series late. The first book surprised me in its elegant simplicity. At the time, I had read SFF by some writers of color already, from earlier efforts, like W. E. B. Du Bois' short story "The Comet," to works by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel Delany, and others, as well as graphic texts featuring a diverse cast of characters, like Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' series Saga. A Wizard of Earthsea both reminded me of them and was unlike them, all the same, in the way that it told such a standard but gripping narrative for its genre. I breezed through it in bed, on the rattling subway, on a weekend trip with my partner. It felt enriching to enter a world where people whose skin resembled mine were the majority, the norm, the foundation of a world. It felt surprising and courageous, too, when I remembered the date of its publication.

A Wizard of Earthsea tells a classic tale-"conventional enough not to frighten reviewers," in Le Guin's words. It begins with Ged as a boy learning that he may have the ability to use magic from a duplicitous witch; Ged's powers, raw but potent, save his village from an attack by barbarians. Ged ventures to a wizarding school, where he learns the greatest key of magic: that knowing the true name of something gives one control over it. From his early days in the school, however, another boy, Jasper, repeatedly provokes Ged, looking down upon him for his humble bucolic origins. When the two decide to see who possesses the greatest magical ability, Ged naively and arrogantly claims he can raise the dead. He does-but at great cost, as an evil, monstrous shadow is let loose into the world from his casual rending of the boundary between the living and the dead. The shadow attacks Ged; he is only saved from it devouring his soul by the quick appearance of a mage from the school, who scares it off. After the assault, Ged is left near death and with almost all his power gone, and the rest of the book sees him attempting to both regain his powers and finally face down the shadow. The shadow is the result of his inexperience, his hubris, his braggadocio-but it is also the perfect foe for Ged, who eventually learns that he can never fully escape his shadow, for it also represents Ged himself. The past is never dead, as Faulkner tells us; our shadows never quite disappear, even when we think they do.

From the start, Le Guin flips the genre's standard racial dynamics. "The principal characters [in fantasy] were men," she said in the afterword, and "the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil." But in her novel, the first antagonists Ged encounters are "a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns." In the final third of the book, Ged, shipwrecked by the sinister shadow on a desolate bit of reef, reflects that he "is in the very sea-roads of those white barbaric folk." The novel does not go as far as to suggest that lightness of skin is bad, a sign of inferiority or inherent iniquity; instead, it simply and naturally, without drawing attention to itself, reverses the racial dynamics so common in American and British fantasy, wherein I'm so accustomed to seeing someone with skin like mine or darker as the casual, callous villains.

Fantasy (and, to a lesser degree, sci-fi) is at once far removed from our world and, often, an echo of it all the same-and that echo is not always pleasant. For all the pomp and imaginativeness of its worlds, a great deal of fantasy of A Wizard of Earthsea 's era skewed conservative at its core, able to imagine orcs and dragons but scarcely able to envision relationships that defied the tropes of a heterosexual nuclear family.

While the foundations of a fantastical world are up to the author, it is telling when even the realms we can invent, almost from scratch, so closely resemble the simple foundations of a non-liberal weltanschauung, embodied in the traditionalistic landscapes of a vague medieval Europe so common in certain fantastical tales; there may be war and bloodshed and political upheaval, but little to no political subversion in how gender or sexuality are represented. The males desire and pursue the females; in some cases, fantasy tales simply replicate the white American nuclear family dynamic of the 1950s. When humans or humanlike beings appear, they are often white if good and darker-skinned if bad; men were overwhelmingly heroes, while women were usually relegated to being beauteous damsels in distress or deceitful seductresses, the latter often crass symbols of Orientalism or simply of misogyny.

A Wizard of Earthsea can't be praised for its depiction of women. To her credit, Le Guin was aware of this failing. She chides fantasy of Earthsea 's era for having women-if women were present at all-who were usually merely "a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princes); active women (dark witches)," she continued, "usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men."

Ironically, so is A Wizard of Earthsea. "It's in this sense," she acknowledged, "that A Wizard of Earthsea was perfectly conventional. The hero does what a man is supposed to do....[It's] a world where women are secondary, a man's world." Though I'm happy Le Guin could admit this failing, it's frustrating to read a book that seems so quietly surprising in one way-its natural reversal of racial dynamics in fantasy-and so hackneyed in another-its portrayal of women as little more than beautiful or deceiving objects. The world is heavily male; the narrator refers frequently uses male pronouns as a way of suggesting general or universal truths. Women appear only on the margins, and when anyone distaff does appear, she is merely an object of beauty or a deadly, deceiving lure for Ged.

Just as Le Guin worried about centering nonwhite characters in A Wizard of Earthsea, the idea of female protagonists in fantasy and sci-fi has a long history of controversy. When L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz-sometimes considered the first genuinely American piece of fantasy-Baum received resistance from readers unnerved by the idea of a little girl as the hero. (Of course, this conception had already appeared in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland books.) Similarly, as Justine Larbalestier has explored in The Battle of the Sexes, early sci-fi fans-who were predominantly male-engaged in vituperative arguments about whether or not women should appear in sci-fi stories at all.

Isaac Asimov smirked at the idea. "When we want science fiction, we don't want any swooning dames," he said in one of his many letters on the subject to a sci-fi magazine, in which he argued with other letter-writers who called for better representation of womanhood in science fiction. After a man named Donald G. Turnbull wrote a letter to Astonishing Science Fiction in 1938 to argue that "[a] woman's place is not in anything scientific," Asimov called for "[t]hree rousing cheers on Donald G. Turnbull for his valiant attack on those favoring mush." "Notice, too, that many top-notch, grade-A, wonderful, marvelous, etc., etc., authors get along swell without any women, at all," Asimov wrote in 1939 in another letter about sci-fi. For all the swirling beauty of his imagination, Asimov was scarcely able to imagine something more down-to-earth, dull and sublunary: that women could be autonomous beings, in or out of sci-fi.

Ironically, Le Guin herself would be one of the titans in attempting to complicate how we present gender in sci-fi and fantasy, perhaps most of all in her magisterial novel The Left Hand of Darkness. And more recent texts, like N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season or Marjorie Liu's Monstress graphic novels, feature women at their center; Monstress goes so far as to quietly make women the majority of the characters in its world, never drawing attention to this fact but simply presenting primarily women as its heroes, antiheroes, and villains. Mackenzi Lee's historical SFF, The Gentlemen's Guide to Vice and Virtue and the more recent The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy, center queer men in the former and a variety of women in the latter, the most notable being Felicity Montague, who fights against sexist seventeenth-century assumptions that women should not practice medicine (or science more broadly), and appears to be on the asexual spectrum-a resonant move, given how infrequently asexual characters appear in literature.

In a more foundational sense, fantasy has long had a problem with race that goes beyond its frequent centering of white characters. The genre gives us carte blanche to create the cosmos anew, yet many of the classic texts of the genre simply replicate old racialist ideas, trying to hide them by making them appear different on the outside; at worst, certain texts become a kind of minstrelsy Halloween parade, where minstrels wear the costumes of orcs, gods, and goblins. What is it, if not racialism, when certain groups of sentient beings all share the same traits, not unlike old bigoted theories from European and American colonists about how all black people, supposedly, shared the same deficiencies?

In this cultural moment, we need narratives that subvert the old assumptions of a genre. To be sure, a white American writer incorporating black characters isn't the same as a black American writer doing so, as the latter has long had to struggle harder for any baseline form of acceptance. That Le Guin was white doubtless made her book slightly more palatable to certain readers (even those prejudiced against her for daring to write as a woman). And Earthsea 's power did not make things much easier for black writers in the same genres like Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, or N. K. Jemisin; it is telling that Jemisin, at the Brooklyn Book Festival this year, revealed that she had been accused by an unnamed person of being "uppity" when she gave her tremendous Hugo acceptance speech on the occasion of her third successive win.

But for all its flaws, it's hard not to enjoy A Wizard of Earthsea -and to think of it, fondly, in a world where characters who look like me are finally starting to seem less rare, less marvelous than finding wisteria on the moon, and the simple magic of seeing someone so different as the main character comes to feel almost as incredible as all of Ged's feats of goodness and gramarye combined.

The Books of Earthsea omnibus is available October 30th from Saga Press.

Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Tin House, Guernica, Slate, New York Magazine's The Cut, Electric Literature, HuffPost, and elsewhere. Find her at gabriellebellot.com.

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How Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea Subverts Racism (But Not Sexism)

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This week, Saga Press releases a gorgeous new omnibus edition of Ursula K. Le Guin's Books of Earthsea, illustrated by Charles Vess, in celebration of A Wizard of Earthsea's 50th annive...

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" Gritty, empathetic, finely rendered, no sugary toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled. " Margaret Atwood

" A welcome return ... Firefly seems ripped from the headlines and is both timely and terrific." Mick Herron
From the refugee camps of Greece to the mountains of Macedonia, a thirteen year old boy is making his way to Germany and safety. Codenamed 'Firefly', he holds vital intelligence: unparalleled insight into a vicious ISIS terror cell, and details of their plans. But the terrorists are hot on his trail, determined he won't live to pass on the information.

When MI6 become aware of Firefly and what he knows, the race is on to find him. Paul Samson, ex-MI6 agent and now private eye, finds himself recruited to the cause. Fluent in Arabic thanks to his Lebanese heritage, Samson's job is to find Firefly, win his trust and get him to safety.

A devastatingly timely thriller following the refugee trail from Syria to Europe, Firefly is a sophisticated, breathtaking race against time from the acclaimed and award-winning author of Brandenburg and The Dying Light.

"Firefly proves once again that Porter is both his own man and the proud carrier of the flag first unfurled by John le Carré more than fifty years ago. British espionage fiction is the best in the world, and Porter is part of the reason why." Lee Child

" With its vivid portrait of the flood of refugees moving west from Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey, the book could not be more timely. Porter's sympathy for the dispossessed is as cogent here as his skill at sustaining narrative tension." Guardian

A hilariously charming novel about a heartbroken man trying to redeem himself by championing forgotten books

Fleeing heartbreak, an unnamed author goes to an unnamed city to give a series of lectures at an unnamed university about forgotten books ... only to find himself involved in a mystery when the professor who invited him is nowhere to be found, and no one seems quite sure why he's there....

So begins this Wes Anderson-like novel hilariously spoofing modernist literature even as it tells a stirring - and eerily suspenseful - story about someone desperate to prove the redeeming power of reading - and writing - books.

And as the narrator gives his lectures, attends vague functions where no one speaks English, never quite meets his host professor and wonders the city looking for the grave of his literary hero, the reader begins to suspect this man's relentless faith in literature may be the only thing getting him through the mystery enveloping him.

" A riotous, triumphant rattlebag of a novel. C.D.Rose has created an intricate exploration of literary intrigue, suspense and levity - lose yourself in this book at once, and savour every moment." Eley Williams, author of Attrib. & Other Stories

" Stirring, spellbinding and full of life." Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup: bringing an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDs epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, he finds his partner is infected, and that he might even have the virus himself. The only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago epidemic, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways the AIDS crisis affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. Yale and Fiona's stories unfold in incredibly moving and sometimes surprising ways, as both struggle to find goodness in the face of disaster.

" This expansive, huge-hearted novel conveys the scale of the trauma that was the early AIDS crisis, and conveys, too, the scale of the anger and love that rose up to meet it. Makkai shows us characters who are devastated but not defeated, who remain devoted, in the face of death, to friendship and desire and joyful, irrepressible life. I loved this book." Garth Greenwell author of What Belongs to You
" Well imagined, intricately plotted, and deeply felt, both humane and human." Rabih Alameddine

" An antidote to our general urge to forget what we'd rather not remember, but it's also - which is more important - an absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it's like to live during times of crisis." Michael Cunningham, New York Times

A deep and luminous story of late love and second chances - an enduring novel of ideas about life, love and the surprises it throws at us.
Sometimes it takes a stranger to really know who you are
When Tina Hopgood writes a letter of regret to a man she has never met, she doesn't expect a reply.

When Anders Larsen, a lonely museum curator, answers it, nor does he.

They're both searching for something, they just don't know it yet.

Anders has lost his wife, along with his hopes and dreams for the future. Tina is trapped in a marriage she doesn't remember choosing.

Slowly their correspondence blossoms as they bare their souls to each other with stories of joy, anguish and discovery. But then Tina's letters suddenly cease, and Anders is thrown into despair.

Can their unexpected friendship survive?

" A moving tribute to friendship and love, to the courage of the ordinary, and to starting again." Rachel Joyce

" Full of grace and humanity." Sunday Times

" A thoughtful and gentle meditation on buried passions, regrets, love, grief and loneliness . . . Youngson's debut offers hope for change in its tender exploration of what it means to have experienced a life well-lived." Guardian

" A quirky, wise and tender novel. Proof that the richest fruits come on the edge of autumn." Sarah Dunant

" What a writer he was; he could flip over a sentence so gently, and show the underbelly in a heartbeat. His work is always quietly compassionate." Elizabeth Strout

In this final collection of ten exquisite, perceptive and profound stories, William Trevor probes into the depths of the human spirit. Here we encounter a tutor and his pupil, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they meet again years later; a young girl who discovers the mother she believed dead is alive and well; and a piano-teacher who accepts her pupil's theft in exchange for his beautiful music. These gorgeous stories - the last that Trevor wrote before his death - affirm his place as one of the world's greatest storytellers.

" Trevor is a master of both language and storytelling." Hilary Mantel

" He is one of the great short-story writers, at his best the equal of Chekhov." John Banville

" None but those with a complete mastery of fiction can walk this line. William Trevor was not "an Irish Chekhov" or even "the Irish Chekhov". He was and will remain the Irish William Trevor." Julian Barnes, Guardian
Back at dinner, somebody said that the goose thinks it's a dog. No, it doesn't. It doesn't think it's a dog. The goose doesn't think. The goose just is. And what the goose is is goose. But goose is not goose, Robert thinks. Even the goose isn't goose.
In Good Trouble, the first story collection from Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland, characters are forced to discover exactly who they are, and who they can never quite be.

There's Rob, who swears he is a dependable member of society, but can't scrape together a character reference to prove that's the case. And Jayne, who has no choice but to investigate a strange noise downstairs while her husband lies glued to the bed with fear. A mother tries to find where she fits into her son's new life of semi-soft rind-washed cheeses, and a poet tries to fathom what makes a poet. Do you even have to write poetry?

Packed with O'Neill's trademark acerbic humour, Good Trouble explores the maddening and secretly political space between thoughts and deeds, between men and women, between goose and not-goose.

" O'Neill's intelligence and invention puts him ahead of the pack." Sunday Times
You empower yourself and then you reach out to others.
Uplifting life lessons from one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known... through the eyes of the grandson whose life he changed forever.

In his book Going to the Mountain, Ndaba Mandela shares the story of his coming-of-age alongside South Africa's rebirth. It is a remarkable journey, and one that took him from the violent, segregated Soweto ghettos to his grandfather's presidential home.

As a young boy, Ndaba was constantly shunted from place to place. But at eleven years old he was unexpectedly invited to live with his grandfather, Nelson Mandela, even though he had met him only once before, during a prison visit. And, slowly, they built a relationship that would affect both of them profoundly.

Ndaba's teenage years were complicated, but as he approached his twenty-first birthday, Mandela decided that Ndaba was finally ready to 'go to the mountain' - a test of courage during which you become a man. At the end of this gruelling ritual journey, the elders of the Mandelas' tribe gathered and Ndaba's grandfather was there, as ever, to share his greatest life lessons.

From Nelson Mandela, Ndaba learned the spirit of endurance, the triumph of forgiveness, the power of resistance and the beauty of reconciliation. And as Mandela grew older, Ndaba had the chance to repay his grandfather's love and support by demonstrating the ways in which he'd understood all that he had taught him.

Intimate and inspirational, Going to the Mountain is a powerful reminder of how one person can impact profoundly on another, and a testament to the awesome power within us to change ourselves and our world.

The first authorised and authenticated collection of correspondence spanning the 27 years Nelson Mandela was held as a political prisoner.

While incarcerated in South Africa as a sentenced prisoner between 1962 and 1990, Nelson Mandela wrote hundreds of letters to loved ones, followers, prison authorities and government officials documenting his plight as the most prominent political prisoner of the twentieth century. Organised chronologically and divided by the four jails in which he was imprisoned, approximately 250 selected letters many of them never before seen by the public have been assembled here from the collections held by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the South African National Archives and the Mandela family, amongst others, together with a foreword by Mandela's granddaughter.

With accompanying facsimiles of some of the letters and generous annotations, the book provides a personal and intimate portrait of the lawyer and political activist as husband, parent, friend and political prisoner, reflecting on everything from the trajectory of the anti-apartheid movement to the death of his beloved son, Thembi.

Publishing for the centenary of Mandela s birth, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela forms a new autobiographical vision, providing insight into how Mandela maintained his inner spirits while living in almost complete isolation and how he engaged with an outside world that became increasingly outraged by his plight.

" Madiba's words give us a compass in a sea of change. Firm ground amidst swirling currents." Barack Obama

" A veritable treasure trove, they grant a forensic insight into his courage, superhuman fortitude and clarity of political judgment; into his agony at failing in his duties as a husband and father of two girls, toddlers when he was snatched away; and his torment at being refused permission to attend either his mother's or his son's funeral. To me, even as a biographer of Mandela, it is a revelatory volume." Peter Hain, The Daily Telegraph

"... this mesmerising book of prison letters... through these compelling letters the thinking, feeling, loving man he was comes back to us. " Gillian Slovo, Guardian

" Remarkably, this collection only serves to enhance and consolidate Mandela's reputation as a defining figure of the last century and the present one. The letters are in multiple languages, English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa, but they speak the language of humanity, which is the language of that fraught but loaded prison word: time." Herald

Nelson Mandela's two great-grandchildren ask their grandmother, Mandela's youngest daughter, 15 questions about their grandad - the global icon of peace and forgiveness who spent 27 years in prison. They learn that he was a freedom fighter who put down his weapons for the sake of peace, and who then became the President of South Africa and a Nobel Peace Prize-winner, and realise that they can continue his legacy in the world today. Seen through a child's perspective, and authored jointly by Nelson Mandela's great-grandchildren and daughter, this amazing story is told as never before to celebrate what would have been Nelson's Mandela 100th birthday.

"... profoundly moving ..." Publishers Weekly

"... beautiful and inspiring... A gorgeous and personal tribute to Mandela's legacy." Kirkus Reviews

What can one word do? If used correctly, it can make us laugh and make us cry. With Melusi's Everyday Zulu, Melusi Tshabalala has been demonstrating the power of a single word. Every single day (except Sundays), he posts a single Zulu word on his Facebook profile accompanied by a left-field explanation and examples of its use. His unique writing style, wonky sense of humour, frank political commentary and razor-sharp social observations give his readers a one-of-a-kind insight into not only isiZulu but the world Melusi inhabits, as a 21st century Zulu man.

Within a few short months, Melusi's Everyday Zulu has built up a huge following. His fans love him for his honesty and commitment to pointing out subtle and overt forms of prejudice and racism. He holds up a mirror that shows South African society in all its flaws but also its sheer humanity. He makes us laugh at ourselves and with each other.

Frank, thought-provoking, intimate and hilarious - this is a book every South African should read to discover just how much we have in common.

Nothing in life is certain, except death and taxes - or so the saying goes. South African tax dodgers and criminals - from drug dealers and rhino horn smugglers to one of the hitmen who shot Brett Kebble - have come to realise this truth the hard way.

Former tax sleuth and bestselling author of Rogue, Johann van Loggerenberg, was at the centre of several such high-profile SARS cases that spanned many years. He offers a riveting insider's view on some of these cases, like the investigations into Dave King, Billy Rautenbach, Barry Tannenbaum, as well as Jacob Zuma, Julius Malema and others.

Since the early days of democracy, a small but determined band of people at SARS who fulfilled various investigative functions came to know every trick and scam in the book, and developed the expertise on how best to hold tax dodgers to account. Their cases often dragged on for years, with many of the defendants using every legal trick to fight back - but SARS never gave up.

Van Loggerenberg also revisits events around the hollowing out of the tax authority post-2014 and brings the reader up to date on the extraordinary occurrences at SARS since the new dawn of the Cyril Ramaphosa era.

"The Life and Rhymes has a performative quality reminiscent of Zephaniah's poetry - honest, unshowy and ultimately unthreatening. It matches the man." Guardian

Benjamin Zephaniah, who has travelled the world for his art and his humanitarianism, now tells the one story that encompasses it all: the story of his life.

In the early 1980s when punks and Rastas were on the streets protesting about unemployment, homelessness and the National Front, Benjamin's poetry could be heard at demonstrations, outside police stations and on the dance floor. His mission was to take poetry everywhere, and to popularise it by reaching people who didn't read books. His poetry was political, musical, radical and relevant.

By the early 1990s, Benjamin had performed on every continent in the world (a feat which he achieved in only one year) and he hasn't stopped performing and touring since. Nelson Mandela, after hearing Benjamin's tribute to him while he was in prison, requested an introduction to the poet that grew into a lifelong relationship, inspiring Benjamin's work with children in South Africa. Benjamin would also go on to be the first artist to record with The Wailers after the death of Bob Marley in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela.

The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah is a truly extraordinary life story which celebrates the power of poetry and the importance of pushing boundaries with the arts.

Landa Mabenge is born in April 1981. He comes into this world trapped in a girl's body, and is christened Yolanda, after the American gospel singer. At just two days old, Yolanda's biological mother rejects her 'daughter' and hands the infant to her sister, who immediately becomes 'Ma'.

From an early age Yolanda is aware that she does not fit into her body. Why does she not have a penis like her boy cousins? Why does she have to wear dresses when all she wants is to wear trousers and shorts like all the other boys? Why does she feel excited when she is close to her girl cousin?

At age 11 Yolanda's world is shattered when an angry woman and her zombie-like husband unexpectedly arrive in Umtata to force Yolanda to accompany them to Port Elizabeth. Life in PE with her new 'parents' soon morphs into a Dickensian nightmare. Uprooted from a stable and loving home in Umtata, where she was accepted for who she was, she is now subjected to horrific physical, emotional and psychological abuse.

At UCT the harassment from her mother continues by way of phone calls accusing her of being a whore, of sleeping around and of having AIDS. Landa begins isolating herself and drinking heavily. She starts attending sessions through UCT counselling services, with therapist Birgit Schreiber, a woman who will play a pivotal role in her transformation. By the end of the year she suffers a total breakdown.

She is finally disowned by her biological mother, which paves the way for Yolanda to shift out of the identity that has held her hostage and now embrace becoming Landa. She has become he. When Landa's biological parents pass on in 2008/2009, he begins intensive research around what it will entail to embark on gender realignment. The next few years see Landa undertake a mammoth mission to transition.

Today Landa lives a transformed and happy life as a transgender activist and consultant. One of his favourite quotes comes from the book Charlotte's Web, 'We're born, we live a little while, we die.' Becoming Him, under the mentorship of best-selling author and publisher, Melinda Ferguson, is his debut memoir.

Bestselling author Simon Winchester writes a magnificent history of the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs boson.

Precision is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged and essential component of our modern social, mercantile, scientific, mechanical and intellectual landscapes. The items we value in our daily lives - a camera, phone, computer, bicycle, car, a dishwasher perhaps - all sport components that fit together with precision and operate with near perfection. We also assume that the more precise a device the better it is. And yet whilst we live lives peppered and larded with precision, we are not, when we come to think about it, entirely sure what precision is, or what it means. How and when did it begin to build the modern world?

As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?

" Winchester makes a convincing case ... Exactly succeeds resoundingly in making us think more deeply about the everyday objects we take for granted. It challenges us to reflect on our progress as humans and what has made it possible. It is interesting, informative, exciting and emotional, and for anyone with even some curiosity about what makes the machines of our world work as well as they do, it's a real treat." New York Times

" Simon Winchester's new book is a tale of many triumphs ... His delight in words cannot be bridled, so that even Exactly, which is, after all, a nonfiction treatment of technology, brims with amusing and rare nouns such as bagatelle, bijoux, cynosure, seraglio and susurrus. These whir smoothly alongside the argot of the machine shop ... Mr. Winchester covers more than 200 years of fine-tuning in this work, and corrals a large cast of eccentric individuals." Wall Street Journal

" Both a saga of tragedies and a detective story... Pale Rider is not just an excavation but a reimagining of the past." Guardian

With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I.

In Pale Rider, Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain, and from South Africa to Odessa. She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered; and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test.

Laura Spinney demonstrates that the Spanish flu was as significant - if not more so - as two world wars in shaping the modern world; in disrupting, and often permanently altering, global politics, race relations, family structures, and thinking across medicine, religion and the arts.

" With superb investigative skill and a delightfully light-hearted writing style, Spinney extends her analysis far beyond the relatively short duration of the plague... I've seldom had so much fun reading about people dying." The Times

" Weaves together global history and medical science to great effect ... Riveting." Sunday Times

" Chilling . . . Reads like a West Coast version of All the President's Men." New York Times Book Review

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionise the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.

In Bad Blood, John Carreyrou tells the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

" Riveting . . . blistering . . . compelling . . . [Carreyrou's] unmasking of Theranos is a tale of David and Goliath." Financial Times

" A dazzling story of deception in Silicon Valley . . . It is a tale of heroic cupidity on a scale that made the very best and the very brightest look like the very, very foolish . . . You will not be able to put this book down." Washington Post

" Simply one of the best books about a startup ever." Forbes

There is nothing quite as beautiful as an English country house in summer. And there has never been a summer quite like that Indian summer between the two world wars, a period of gentle decline in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes.

Real life in the country house during the 1920s and 1930s was not always so sunny. By turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, its shadows were darker. In The Long Weekend, Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the truth about a world half-forgotten, draped in myth and hidden behind stiff upper lips and film-star smiles.

Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, on unpublished letters and diaries, on the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and unhappy heiresses and bullying butlers, The Long Weekend gives a voice to the people who inhabited this world and shows how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs, and how the reality was so much more interesting than the dream.

"[A] fantastically readable and endlessly fascinating book... Delicious, occasionally fantastical, revealing in ways that Downton Abbey never was. It is as if Tinniswood is at the biggest, wildest, most luxuriantly decadent party ever thrown, and he knows everyone." Rachel Cooke, Observer

" Tinniswood and his publishers should be congratulated for issuing this elegant, encyclopedic and entertaining history... We are in the company of a confident and skilled historian who understands the mores of his era and wears his learning lightly... This is a handsomely illustrated pick'n'mix of mansions, manors, castles and palaces.... Tinniswood expands our Sunday evening viewing with the kind of detail you can't invent... Deserves to be on every costume drama producer's bookshelf." Virginia Nicholson, The Times

"A major literary talent . . . speaks about the power and powerlessness that young women are subject to in a wholly fresh, clear-eyed way . . . you'll find it hard to come away from The Terrible without a stab of recognition in your chest." Stylist

You may not run away from the thing that you are
because it comes and comes and comes as sure as you breathe.

This is the story of Yrsa Daley-Ward, and all the things that happened - 'even the Terrible Things (and God, there were Terrible Things)'. It's about her childhood in the north-west of England with her beautiful, careworn mother and her little brother who sees things written in the stars.

It's also about growing up and discovering the power and fear of sexuality, about pitch grey days of pills and powder: going under, losing yourself, and finding your voice.

" Yrsa's work is like holding the truth in your hands." Florence Welch

" Elegant, daring, profound - confirms her abundant talent as a writer." Arifa Akbar, Observer

" Beautiful and harrowing . . . Daley-Ward writes with disarming honesty." Vogue

" Daley-Ward is a stylish writer, as well as an unusual voice . . . she has a knack for distilling wild emotions into precise imagery, for selecting insightful impressions." Sunday Times

" Frank Tallis brings a lifetime's clinical experience and wise reflection to a condition that, by its own strange routes, leads us into the very heart of love itself. This is a brilliant, compelling book. " Ian McEwan

Love is a great leveller. Everyone wants love, everyone falls in love, everyone loses love, and everyone knows something of love's madness. But the experience of obsessive love is no trivial matter. In the course of his career psychologist Dr Frank Tallis has treated many unusual patients, whose stories have lessons for all of us.

A barristers' clerk becomes convinced that her dentist has fallen in love with her and they are destined to be together for eternity; a widow is visited by the ghost of her dead husband; an academic is besotted with his own reflection; a beautiful woman searches jealously for a rival who isn't there; and a night porter is possessed by a lascivious demon. These are just some of the people whom we meet in an extraordinary and original book that explores the conditions of longing and desire - true accounts of psychotherapy that take the reader on a journey through the darker realms of the amorous mind.

Drawing on the latest scientific research into the biological and psychological mechanisms underlying romance and emotional attachment, The Incurable Romantic demonstrates that ultimately love dissolves the divide between what we judge to be normal and abnormal.

" I have enjoyed The Incurable Romantic, in which psychotherapist Frank Tallis opens his casebook. There have been quite a few such books recently, most of them overpraised and not as well written as their admirers claim. But Tallis writes with clarity and wit about the morbid condition of love, which emerges here as a kind of mental disorder . . . riveting stuff." Sebastian Faulks, Guardian

" A gifted storyteller . . . Tallis's characters remain sharply, painfully real, their stories as inconclusive, messy and fascinating as life." Economist

" It is utterly compelling: the details, the dialogue, which bring each character, however heavily disguised, leaping of the page . . . a fine writer. He is alert to every nuance . . . He knows how to tell a story. Boy, does he know how to tell a story. [A] powerful and moving book." The Times

How did we get from the Big Bang to today's staggering complexity, in which seven billion humans are connected into networks powerful enough to transform the planet? And why, in comparison, are our closest primate relatives reduced to near-extinction?

Big History creator David Christian gives the answers in a mind-expanding cosmological detective story told on the grandest possible scale. He traces how, during eight key thresholds, the right conditions have allowed new forms of complexity to arise, from stars to galaxies, Earth to homo sapiens, agriculture to fossil fuels. This last mega-innovation gave us an energy bonanza that brought huge benefits to mankind, yet also threatens to shake apart everything we have created.

This global origin story is one that we could only begin to tell recently, thanks to the underlying unity of modern knowledge. Panoramic in scope and thrillingly told, Origin Story reveals what we learn about human existence when we consider it from a universal scale.

" I have long been a fan of David Christian. In Origin Story, he elegantly weaves evidence and insights from many scientific and historical disciplines into a single, accessible historical narrative." Bill Gates
" In Origin Story, David Christian has found a spectacular way to use history to put order in the entire set of our knowledge about the world. This is a wonderful achievement." Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time

" Mr. Christian tells this story very well, providing, in effect, a short course in modern science. This is a brief history of the universe, and an excellent one." Wall St. Journal

On May 27th, 1784, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart met a flirtatious little starling who sang (an improved version of!) the theme from his Piano Concerto Number 17 in G to him. Knowing a kindred spirit when he met one, Mozart wrote "That was wonderful" in his journal and took the bird home to be his pet. For three years Mozart and his family enjoyed the uniquely delightful company of the starling until one April morning when the bird passed away.

In 2013, Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Crow Planet, rescued her own starling, Carmen, who has become a part of her family. In Mozart's Starling, Haupt explores the unlikely bond between one of history's most controversial characters and one of history's most notoriously disliked birds. Part natural history, part story, Mozart's Starling will delight readers as they learn about language, music, and the secret world of starlings.

" This hard-to-put-down, charming blend of science, biography, and memoir illuminating the little-known story of the composer and his beloved bird is enlivened by the immediacy of Haupt's tales of Carmen, and brimming with starling information, travelogues, and historical details about Mozart's Vienna. " Booklist (Starred Review)

" Mozart's Starling is a delightful, enlightening, breathless flight through the worlds of Carmen and Star, two European starlings who join their human counterparts in exploring life and music and nature, helping to shed light on the connection between humans and birds - those of us bound to terra firma, and those who are free to soar." Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain

Trees are one of humanity's most constant and most varied companions. From India's sacred banyan tree to the fragrant cedar of Lebanon, they offer us sanctuary and inspiration - not to mention the raw materials for everything from aspirin to maple syrup.

In Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori uses plant science to illuminate how trees play a role in every part of human life, from the romantic to the regrettable. Stops on the trip include the lime trees of Berlin's Unter den Linden boulevard, which intoxicate amorous Germans and hungry bees alike, the swankiest streets in nineteenth-century London, which were paved with Australian eucalyptus wood, and the redwood forests of California, where the secret to the trees' soaring heights can be found in the properties of the tiniest drops of water.

Each of these strange and true tales - populated by self-mummifying monks, tree-climbing goats and ever-so-slightly radioactive nuts - is illustrated by Lucille Clerc, taking the reader on a journey that is as informative as it is beautiful.

" This is the best love letter to trees I have ever read. Had I written it myself, I would die happy." Sir Tim Smit, Founder of The Eden Project

" I have loved trees all my life. It's fascinating to learn how, across the world, they have inspired people in much the same way, and to understand the key role they play, not just in our lives, but life as a whole." Dame Judi Dench

" Full of new ideas and wonderful stories about the trees that helped shape us, I really loved this entertaining and erudite world journey." Beccy Speight, Chief Executive, The Woodland Trust

" In this delightful and beautifully illustrated book Jonathan provides a collection of fascinating biographies of some of the world's most extraordinary trees. [...] This is a personal narrative; Jonathan's love for trees, and his sense of wonder at the diversity of the natural world, shines through on every page." Richard Deverell, Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

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For years Jaxie Clackton has dreaded going home. His beloved mum is dead, and he wishes his dad was too, until one terrible moment leaves his life stripped to nothing. No one ever told Jaxie Clackton to be careful what he wishes for. And so Jaxie runs.

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John Gray: Is Human Progress an Illusion?

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John Gray: Is Human Progress an Illusion?

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"Straw Dogs is an attack on the unthinking beliefs of thinking people."
- John Gray

***

We like to think that the tide of history is an inexorable march from barbarity to civilization, with humans "progressing" from one stage to the next through a gradual process of enlightenment. Modern humanists like Steven Pinker argue forcefully for this method of thinking.

But is this really so? Is this reality?

One of the leading challengers to that type of thinking has been the English writer and philosopher John Gray, the idiosyncratic author of books like Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, The Soul of the Marionette, and The Silence of Animals.

To Gray, the concept of "progress" is closer to an illusion, or worse a delusionof the modern age. Civilization is not a permanent state of being, but something which can quickly recede during a time of stress.

He outlines his basic idea in a foreword to Straw Dogs:

Straw Dogs is an attack on the unthinking beliefs of thinking people. Today, liberal humanism has the pervasive power that was once possessed by revealed religion. Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world's religions.

Outside of science, progress is simply a myth. In some readers of Straw Dogs this observation seems to have produced a moral panic. Surely, they ask, no one can question the central article of faith of liberal societies? Without it, will we not despair? Like trembling Victorians terrified of losing their faith, these humanists cling to the moth-eaten brocade of progressive hope. Today religious believers are more free-thinking. Driven to the margins of a culture in which science claims authority over all of human knowledge, they have had to cultivate a capacity for doubt. In contrast, secular believers - held fast by the conventional wisdom of the time - are in the grip of unexamined dogmas.

And what, pray tell, are those dogmas? They are numerous, but the central one must be that the human march of science and technology creates good for the world. Gray's not as sure: He sees science and technology as magnifying humanity "warts and all".

Our tools allow us to go to the Moon but also murder each other with great alacrity. They have no morality attached to them.

In science, the growth of knowledge is cumulative. But human life as a whole is not a cumulative activity; what is gained in one generation may be lost in the next. In science, knowledge is an unmixed god; in ethics and politics it is bad as well as good. Science increases human power - and magnifies the flaws in human nature. It enables us to live longer and have higher living standards than in the past. At the same time it allows us to wreak destruction - on each other and the Earth - on a larger scale than ever before.

The idea of progress rests on the belief that the growth of knowledge and the advance of the species go together -if not now, then in the long run. The biblical myth of the Fall of Man contains the forbidden truth. Knowledge does not make us free. It leaves us as we have always been, prey to every kind of folly. The same truth is found in Greek myth. The punishment of Prometheus, chained to a rock for stealing fire from the gods, was not unjust.

Gray has a fairly heretical view of technology itself, pointing out that no one really controls its development or use; making humanity as a group closer to subjects than masters. Technology is both a giver of good and an ongoing source of tragedy, because it is used by fallible human beings.

Those who ignore the destructive potential of future technologies can do so only because they ignore history. Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been tyrannies; but without modern means of transport and communication, Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags. Humanity's worst crimes were made possible only by modern technology.

There is a deeper reason why "humanity" will never control technology. Technology is not something that humankind can control. It as an event that has befallen the world.

Once a technology enters human life - whether it be fire, the wheel, the automobile, radio, television, or the internet - it changes it in ways we can never fully understand.

[...]

Nothing is more commonplace than to lament that moral progress has failed to keep pace with scientific knowledge. If only we were more intelligent and more moral, we could use technology only for benign ends. The fault is not in our tools, we say, but in ourselves.

In one sense this is true. Technical progress leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble.

This reminds one of Garrett Hardin 's idea that no system, however technically advanced, can be flawless because the human being at the center of it will always be fallible. (Our technologies, after all, are geared around our needs.) Even if we create technologies that "don't need us" - we are still fallible creators.

Gray's real problem with the idea of moral progress, technical progress, and scientific progress are they, even were they real, would be unending. In the modern conception of the world, unlike the ancient past where everything was seen as cyclical, growth has no natural stop-point. It's just an infinite path to the heavens. This manifests itself in our constant disdain for idleness.

Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them.
In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.

Among Christians, only Protestants have ever believed that work smacks of salvation; the work and prayer of medieval Christendom were interspersed with festivals. The ancient Greeks sought salvation in philosophy, the Indians in meditation, the Chinese in poetry and the love of nature. The pygmies of the African rainforests - now nearly extinct - work only to meet the needs of the day, and spend most of their lives idling.

Progress condemns idleness. The work needed to delivery humanity is vast. Indeed it is limitless, since as one plateau of achievement is reached another looms up. Of course this is only a mirage; but the worst of progress is not that it is an illusion. It is that it is endless.

Gray then goes on to compare our ideas of progress to Sisyphus forever pushing the bolder up the mountain.

He's an interesting thinker, Gray. In all of his works, though he certainly raises issue with our current modes of liberal progressive thought and is certainly not a religious man, one only finds hints of a "better" worldview being proposed. One is never sure if he even believes in "better".

The closest thing to advice comes from the conclusion to his book The Silence of Animals. What is the point of life if not progress? Simply to see. Simply to be human. To contemplate. We must deal with human life the way we always have.

Godless contemplation is a more radical and transient condition: a temporary respite from the all-too-human world, with nothing particular in mind. In most traditions the life of contemplation promises redemption from being human: in Christianity, the end of tragedy and a glimpse of the divine comedy; in Jeffers's pantheism, the obliteration of the self in an ecstatic unity. Godless mysticism cannot escape the finality of tragedy, or make beauty eternal. It does not dissolve inner conflict into the false quietude of any oceanic calm. All it offers is mere being.

There is no redemption from being human. But no redemption is needed.

In the end, reading Gray is a good way to challenge yourself; to think about the world in a different way, and to examine your dogmas. Even the most cherished one of all.

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John Gray: Is Human Progress an Illusion?

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"Straw Dogs is an attack on the unthinking beliefs of thinking people." - John Gray *** We like to think that the tide of history is an inexorable march from barbarity to civilization, with humans "progressing" from one stage to the next through a gradual process of enlightenment.

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The Best Books on Moral Philosophy | Five Books

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The Best Books on Moral Philosophy | Five Books

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You have chosen mostly non-philosophical books.

I teach philosophy, especially ethics. This could be a list of books by the great philosophers, but only one of them fits that description. This is because the questions I am most interested in are about how we should live and by what values. My list reflects the obvious point that many people who are not philosophers have written books important for this.

But you have gone for Plato's Republic.

The only philosophy book I am choosing. It contains a tremendous amount of nonsense about what the ideal society would be like. But is an unmissable book because of Socrates. He invented the method of doing and teaching philosophy that has never been improved on. His persistent questions forced people to spell out their beliefs more fully and precisely, often unearthing beliefs they hardly knew they had. He would then challenge them with counter-examples, putting pressure on beliefs by pointing out unwelcome consequences they had. This questioning is often both intimidating and liberating. Those of us who teach philosophy aim, not always successfully, for the liberation without the intimidation.

Some of Socrates' opponents in The Republic challenge him as to whether there is any reason to be moral, apart from social pressures. They use a simple but brilliant thought experiment. Would you have any reason to avoid wrongdoing if you had a ring that made you invisible, so there was no chance of getting caught? It is not the answers given to this and the other questions in the book, but the absolutely fundamental challenges of the questions themselves.

Why have you chosen Anna Karenina?

Part of the genius of Tolstoy is his remarkable insight into so many very different people, so that he can portray a whole society and at the same time seem to get inside most of the people he depicts - for example, the description of Kozynyshev and Varenka and the way things went wrong for the proposal of marriage. Although he set out to write a moralising novel showing the evils of Anna's adultery, his human empathy pushed him in a very different direction, and the reader sees every step towards the final tragedy from Anna's point of view and sees how difficult - perhaps impossible - any of the alternatives would have been. There is the feeling that if God wrote novels they might be like this.

Tolstoy's own values come across in the way he treats many different people in the novel. He dislikes careerists and people who say or do things to impress or because they are fashionable, and the people he admires are often inarticulate but deep. Inarticulate: there is a contrast with the values of Socrates here. What the people he admires have in common is a certain kind of seriousness. Anna and Levin are both serious in a way that Vronsky is not. Part of this is giving thought to what your life is about and how you should live. Part of it is pushing through small talk to express things that really matter to you. This can make Levin, for instance, quite clumsy and gauche on social occasions, but reading Tolstoy makes you see how utterly unimportant this is.

What about Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved?

Primo Levi's books all reflect his experiences in Auschwitz. Perhaps because he was a scientist, he wrote with a precision and definiteness, at the opposite pole from rhetoric. This gives his books immense power, as what he describes could only be diminished by any striving for effect. The Drowned and the Saved is his most reflective book on the Nazi genocide and on his own experiences and what he saw in other people. The chapter on "The Grey Zone" is a brilliant discussion of tragic choices and moral ambiguities. The Nazis made people operate the gas chambers as a way of deferring their own deaths. One of the most evil things about the Nazis was the way they tried to destroy not only their victims' lives but also their moral integrity, by means of coercive moral dilemmas. "If you cooperate with us in rounding up your fellow Jews, we will take fewer of them than if you do not." Levi writes about all this with great understanding of the pressures and how difficult they were to resist. He retains moral standards by which to judge people, but without glib moralising. Few people were either pure saints or pure villains. Those of us without his experience are rightly reluctant to criticise people who failed tests we have not had to face. But because Levi had experienced what he describes, his careful discriminations between degrees of good and bad in the "grey zone" have great authority.

And The Kennedy Tapes?

During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the world came the closest it has been to nuclear war. Khrushchev secretly installed missiles in Cuba, and when American spy planes spotted them Kennedy saw that American public opinion would not stand for a nuclear threat so close and possibly under Castro's control. Should the United States bomb the missile sites in Cuba, or might that lead to Soviet retaliation? Would anything less lead to their removal?

Amazingly, and unknown to most participants, the meetings of the committee set up to decide policy were taped, as were many other meetings at the White House. This book gives the complete taped history of the discussions. In human history, no other crisis of comparable gravity has been documented from the inside in this way.

Several things stand out. One is the degree of pressure from some military people to go for the "tough" policy of bombing Cuba, and the strength it needed to resist it.

Another is that Kennedy himself and a few members of his administration had been to a session put on by scientists and others spelling out just what nuclear war would be like. After the session, Kennedy had said, "And we call ourselves the human race." Notably, while others were prepared to risk nuclear war by bombing Cuba, those who had been present at this session were not.

It is interesting that Kennedy deceived the American people by concealing the concession he had to make in the secret part of the negotiations. By removing US missiles in Turkey (as close to the Soviet Union as Cuba is to America), Kennedy gave Khrushchev something to justify to Soviet colleagues his withdrawal of the Cuban missiles. This concession might have been too much for American public opinion. If so, this is a case of an apparently "immoral" act of deception being the right thing to do. It raises questions about the absolute desirability of transparency and honesty in politics.

This is a very different one - Kay Jamison's An Unquiet Mind.

Kay Redfield Jamison is a psychologist who has co-authored the major psychiatric textbook on manic depression. It authoritatively covers every aspect of the science, from genetics to pharmacology, and also has chapters on the links with creativity and on what the illness feels like. The chapters on the subjective experience are enriched with vivid quotations from patients. In her autobiography, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Jamison came out as not only an expert on the illness but also someone who has it. The power of her book comes from her understanding it both scientifically and from the inside.

She describes the sheer awfulness of the periods of depression and (perhaps less convincingly, anyway as a point about people in general) the richness of the high periods. She brings out the importance of both medication and psychotherapy in helping people with the disorder. And she has interesting thoughts on the way her identity is bound up with the illness.

She asks the quite fundamental question of whether she would rather not have had manic depression. She answers unequivocally that, without modern medication, the depression would be so terrible that she would much prefer not to have the illness. But she lives in a time when the medication is available, and - perhaps surprisingly - her answer is that she is not sorry to have manic depression. She is acutely aware of its costs, but thinks that it has given her life a certain emotional resonance she would be sorry to be without. Many with the illness might disagree. But the book, and the life it describes, is a remarkable example of how - as her mother once put it - it matters not only what cards life has dealt you, but also how you play them.

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The Best Books on Moral Philosophy | Five Books

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You have chosen mostly non-philosophical books. I teach philosophy, especially ethics. This could be a list of books by the great philosophers, but only one of them fits that description. This is because the questions I am most interested in are about how we should live and by what values.

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The new digital archive of Gabriel García Márquez with more than 27,000 letters, manuscripts, photos and much more

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The new digital archive of Gabriel García Márquez with more than 27,000 letters, manuscripts, photos and much more

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A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics Turning Us on Each Other and on Ourselves – Brain Pickings

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A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics Turning Us on Each Other and on Ourselves – Brain Pickings

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"It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person," philosopher Amelie Rorty wrote in examining what makes a person through her taxonomy of the seven layers of identity. I have thought about Rorty often in watching the steamroller of our cultural moment level the beautiful, wild topography of personhood into variations on identity politics, demolishing context, dispossessing expression of intention, and flattening persons into identities. Half a century ago, James Baldwin shone a sidewise gleam of admonition against this perilous tendency as he contemplated freedom and how we imprison ourselves: "This collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish."

During a tense recent dinner table conversation about these tensions, I was reminded of a lesser-known legacy of the great Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue (January 1, 1956-January 4, 2008), who has written beautifully about selfhood and the crucible of identity.

In 1997, the Irish broadcaster and radio producer John Quinn conceived of a summer series titled "Webs of Wonder" - a modern embodiment of Descartes's conviction that "wonderment is the first passion of all," exploring the elemental sublimity of wonder through poetry, music, literature, and philosophy. Quinn enlisted O'Donohue in the philosophical component of the program. In a hotel bar in Kinvara, the two sat down to explore the tessellations of wonder in a roaming hourlong conversation, the transcript of which was published as Walking on the Pastures of Wonder: John O'Donohue in Conversation with John Quinn (public library).

In one of the most poignant portions of the conversation, O'Donohue considers the trap of identity, the relationship between limitation and wonder, and how the unquestioned confines us to smaller and smaller compartments of ourselves:

Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there. All thinking, all writing, all action, all creation and all destruction is about that bridge between the two worlds. All thought is about putting a face on experience... One of the most exciting and energetic forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a thought that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. So a question is really one of the forms in which wonder expresses itself. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways to wonder.

[...]

All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking... And thought, if it's not open to wonder, can be limiting, destructive and very, very dangerous.

Two decades after O'Donohue's beautiful words, we have somehow found ourselves in an era where even the brightest, kindest, most idealistic people spring to judgment - which is nothing other than negative wonder - in a heart-flinch. Questions invite instant opinions more often than they invite conversation and contemplation - a peculiar terror of wonder that O'Donohue presaged:

One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.

Paradoxically, in our golden age of identity politics and trigger-ready outrage, this repression of our inner wildness and fracturing of our wholeness has taken on an inverted form, inclining toward a parody of itself. Where Walt Whitman once invited us to celebrate the glorious multitudes we each contain and to welcome the wonder that comes from discovering one another's multitudes afresh, we now cling to our identity-fragments, using them as badges and badgering artillery in confronting the templated identity-fragments of others. (For instance, some of mine: woman, reader, immigrant, writer, queer, survivor of Communism.) Because no composite of fragments can contain, much less represent, all possible fragments, we end up drifting further and further from one another's wholeness, abrading all sense of shared aspiration toward unbiased understanding. The censors of yore have been replaced by the "sensitivity readers" of today, fraying the fabric of freedom - of speech, even of thought - from opposite ends, but fraying it nonetheless. The safety of conformity to an old-guard mainstream has been supplanted by the safety of conformity to a new-order minority predicated on some fragment of identity, so that those within each new group (and sub-group, and sub-sub-group) are as harsh to judge and as fast to exclude "outsiders" (that is, those of unlike identity-fragments) from the conversation as the old mainstream once was in judging and excluding them. In our effort to liberate, we have ended up imprisoning - imprisoning ourselves in the fractal infinity of our ever-subdividing identities, imprisoning each other in our exponentially multiplying varieties of otherness.

This inversion of intent only fissures the social justice movement itself, so that people who are at bottom kindred-spirited - who share the most elemental values, who work from a common devotion to the same projects of justice and equality, who are paving parallel pathways to a nobler, fairer, more equitable world - end up disoriented by the suspicion that they might be on different sides of justice after all, merely because their particular fragments don't happen to coincide perfectly. In consequence, despite our best intentions, we misconstrue and alienate each other more and more.

O'Donohue offers a gentle corrective:

Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions]. But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it. That's the whole mystery of writing and language and expression - that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things.

A generation after James Baldwin asserted that "an artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian [whose] role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are," O'Donohue considers the singular artistry of composing a human life, suspended between the doom and the glory of the interior truths that comprise our identity:

Each one of us is privileged to be the custodian of this inner world, which is accessible only through thought, and we are also doomed, in the sense that we cannot unshackle ourselves from the world that we actually carry... All human being and human identity and human growth is about finding some kind of balance between the privilege and the doom or the inevitability of carrying this kind of world.

Today, we seem to serve not as custodians of our inner worlds but as their terrified and terrible wardens, policing our own interiority along with that of others for any deviation from the proscribed identity-political correctness. And yet identity is exclusionary by definition - we are what remains after everything we are not. Even those remnants are not static and solid ground onto which to stake the flag of an immutable personhood but fluid currents in an ever-shifting, shoreless self - for, as Virginia Wolf memorably wrote, "a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living." To liberate ourselves from the trap of identity, O'Donohue implies, requires not merely an awareness of but an active surrender to the transience that inheres in all of life and engenders its very richness:

One of the most amazing recognitions of the human mind is that time passes. Everything that we experience somehow passes into a past invisible place: when you think of yesterday and the things that were troubling you and worrying you, and the intentions that you had and the people that you met, and you know you experienced them all, but when you look for them now, they are nowhere - they have vanished... It seems to me that our times are very concerned with experience, and that nowadays to hold a belief, to have a value, must be woven through the loom of one's own experience, and that experience is the touchstone of integrity, verification and authenticity. And yet the destiny of every experience is that it will disappear.

To come to terms with this - with the impermanence and mutability of our thoughts, our feelings, our values, our very cells - is to grasp the absurdity of clinging to any strand of identity with the certitude and self-righteousness undergirding identity politics. To reclaim the beauty of the multitudes we each contain, we must break free of the prison of our fragments and meet one another as whole persons full of wonder unblunted by identity-template and expectation.

Complement this particular direction of thought inspired by Walking on the Pastures of Wonder with James Baldwin and Margaret Mead's spectacular conversation about identity and belonging, young Barack Obama on how we fragment our wholeness with polarizing identity politics, and Walt Whitman on identity and the paradox of the self, then revisit O'Donohue on the central pillar of friendship, how our restlessness fuels our creativity, and what makes life's transience bearable.

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walking on the pastures of wonder: john o\'donohue in conversation with john quinn

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A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics Turning Us on Each Other and on Ourselves

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"It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person," philosopher Amelie Rorty wrote in examining what makes a person through her taxonomy of the seven layers of identity.

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Crime and the City: Freetown and Its Colonialist Vice | Literary Hub

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Crime and the City: Freetown and Its Colonialist Vice | Literary Hub

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Sierra Leone-"SL" to its expat community-sits on the shores of the wide Atlantic. Its capital, Freetown, is home to just over a million people. Famously established by freed slaves, it is the oldest city to have been founded by African-Americans (Liberia's Monrovia was established 30 years later). Today the city is crowded and raucous, full of energy and (since being declared Ebola free) is enjoying something of a tourism boom. Facilities might not be always five star but the city is welcoming and not too difficult to navigate: you've got Central, where the organs of SL's state reside; and then simply the West End and the East End (round the port).

Freetown grew on the freedom it offered. Many ex-slaves who escaped to the British Red Coats in the American War of Independence were granted their freedom after Independence and took ships back to Africa; more ex-slaves made it to Nova Scotia and from there on to West Africa; in 1800 600 Maroons were "transported" to Freetown for daring to rise up against the British in Jamaica. London declared the territory a Crown Colony in 1808 and named Freetown the capital of British West Africa, developing it into a sizable Royal Navy base. West Indian and African soldiers of the British army who fought Napoleon were granted the right to settle in Freetown. In World War Two Britain maintained Freetown as a listening post against German U-boats and the Vichy French-controlled colonies close by. Freetown became a busy port for convoys-traversing the Atlantic, heading for South Africa. Most famously, perhaps, Graham Greene was a wartime British intelligence officer in the city.

Greene's 1948 The Heart of the Matter (which has its criminal elements-diamond smuggling, suicides that are possibly murder, espionage) sees Henry Scobie lonely and isolated in wartime Freetown: a disappointing marriage, a half-hearted affair, a career on the rocks. The Heart of the Matter remains the best internationally known novel set in Freetown; although the city is not mentioned specifically by name in the book, Greene finally confirmed the location in his 1980 memoir, Ways of Escape. However, The Heart of the Matter is almost entirely concerned with the colonial ex-pats-malarial and morally tainted policemen, spies, and conniving merchants. It's the Freetown of pink gins at the old Bedford Hotel, government-issue furniture in cockroach-infested Nissen huts, dinner parties to celebrate securing some Argentine beef for a change, the Colonial Secretariat building, the European quarter of Cape Station, and, inevitably, the Club (the English always have a "Club"). Still Greene was nostalgic for his old wartime posting, scanning the sea for German U-boats, diamond smugglers, and the machinations of the Vichy French West African regime close by. He wrote:

In the evening the port (Freetown) became beautiful for perhaps five minutes. The laterite roads that were so ugly and clay-heavy by day became a delicate flower-like pink. It was the hour of content. Men who had left the port for ever would sometimes remember on a grey wet London evening the bloom and glow that faded almost as soon as it was seen: they would wonder why they had hated the coast and for a space of a drink they would long to return.

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But Freetown then, and since, has never been an easy posting. Novels centered on the city's problems have invariably been about outsiders-latterly NGO workers and war correspondents, rather than spies and British colonial officials-and only remotely about the city's majority population, the Sierra Leoneans. Fast-forward to the 1990s and the bloody civil war, which has inspired a number of novels with a crime element set in Freetown.

Minette Walters visits Sierra Leone and Freetown in her 2005 psychological thriller The Devil's Feather. Connie Burns, a war correspondent, is stationed in Freetown during the last weeks of the Civil War. She reports on the case of five women who have been horrifically murdered. Connie suspects a notorious British mercenary, known throughout the expat community for his brutality and violence. The book moves on to Baghdad and England, but Sierra Leone lingers in the reader's memory, a Freetown where a serial killer is on the loose but able to hide in plain sight amid the chaos of the country's fratricidal conflict.

Walters's Freetown is, in some ways, not so different to Greene's. An expat society cut off from the local population; chancers looking to get rich quick (and in Sierra Leone that was, in Greene's day and now, all about diamonds), Lebanese businessmen trade now where Greene encountered Syrians. The Club is now Paddy's Bar, a faux-Irish joint recognizable to anyone who's been an expat anywhere in the developing world that's hot, humid and sticky.

Greene hovers like a shadow seemingly just behind the shoulder of so many writers who have chosen to set their fiction in Freetown. The late Denis Johnson's Laughing Monsters (2014) is easily the literary equal of Greene (whom he obviously admired-Johnson's 2007 Tree of Smoke, an espionage novel set in the Vietnam War, paid obvious dues to Greene's The Quiet American). Greene's 1940s Freetown had rampant blackwater fever (a severe form of malaria) and giant cockroaches; Johnson's contemporary city has an AIDS epidemic and rampant warlords looking to raise funds through kidnapping. Freetown is hellish in Johnson's novel: corrupt, polluted and subject to frequent power outages. There's an espionage tale at the centre of Laughing Monsters, though it is Freetown that is the most engrossing character in the book-alive with bugs, Chinese investors starting to appear, Ebola not so far away like a plague about to invade and devastate.

After a decade of civil war, an uneasy peace (although a busy time for the Sierra Leone Anti-Corruption Commission in the meantime), high murder rates, rising numbers of home invasions, malaria, Ebola, people trafficking, insects the size of small mammals-why on earth would Sierra Leone, and its capital Freetown, need crime fiction? And it seems it doesn't. Popular and acclaimed Sierra Leonean writers have not ventured into the crime genre. Most local writers concentrate on examining the post-civil war society as it affects the poor, women and children. There's a strong poetry tradition and many Sierra Leonean authors have opted for children's literature that reflects the specificities of Freetown life-war orphans, keeping out of trouble, holding families together. Much of this writing is available in English (which is the official language of Sierra Leone), but is the subject for an article other than this.

So, in the main, crime fiction set in and around Freetown remains ostensibly the work of outsiders now, just as it was in the 1940s when Greene wrote The Heart of the Matter. There are a number of novels from German writers that are set in Sierra Leone and other West African countries (many of them part of the former German West African colonies). Unfortunately hardly any of what are called "Afrika-Krimis" have been translated into English so far.

Richard Dooling 's (1994) was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction (the term is an old one applied to West Africa due to the high rate of missionary and colonialist deaths due to climate, disease and lack of sanitation). It was billed as a satire and there's a spy story element to it as well as lots of rumination on myth and magic in Sierra Leone. The two major protagonists-a Peace Corps volunteer and a "cosmic drifter"-are certainly in Sierra Leone, but readers were, it's fair to say, divided over how much the presentation of Freetown and its citizens was ironic or just plain simplistic.

The Secret Keeper (2009) is a tougher proposition altogether. The author Paul Harris was a British war correspondent in Sierra Leone and his descriptions of Freetown are visceral and street level. It's a mystery about uncovering a seemingly random roadside murder, but the book's real strength is atmosphere, a sense of place that moves from civil war-torn Freetown back to shadows of Greene's colonial outpost:

Gradually the car crawled out of Freetown's lower suburbs where the poor masses lived and up into the foothills above the city. In the days of British rule many colonial officials had chosen these shaded slopes for their houses, high enough up in the mountains to catch a lucky breeze... After the British had left, the area had become home to Sierra Leone's ruling class: whether Krio (Creole) politicians, army generals, or Lebanese and Greek families.

Freetown is the capital of a country recovering from a brutal civil war that saw large-scale murder of civilians, children forced into military service, and horrific atrocities. It's not surprising that Sierra Leonean writers might not feel drawn to the crime genre at this point in time. However, foreign crime, espionage and thriller writers like Paul Harris and Denis Johnson particularly, have, much as Graham Greene did before them, given us some small amount of access to Freetown life and its daily problems.

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Crime and the City: Freetown and Its Colonialist Vice

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Sierra Leone-"SL" to its expat community-sits on the shores of the wide Atlantic. Its capital, Freetown, is home to just over a million people. Famously established by freed slaves, it is the oldest city to have been founded by African-Americans (Liberia's Monrovia was established 30 years later).

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The 10 Best Books of 2017 - The New York Times

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The 10 Best Books of 2017 - The New York Times

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In her follow-up to "Salvage the Bones," Ward returns to the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Miss., and the stories of ordinary people who would be easy to classify dismissively into categories like "rural poor," "drug-dependent," "products of the criminal justice system." Instead Ward gives us Jojo, a 13-year-old, and a road trip that he and his little sister take with his drug-addicted black mother to pick up their white father from prison. And there is nothing small about their existences. Their story feels mythic, both encompassing the ghosts of the past and touching on all the racial and social dynamics of the South as they course through this one fractured family. Ward's greatest feat here is achieving a level of empathy that is all too often impossible to muster in real life, but that is genuine and inevitable in the hands of a writer of such lyric imagination.

Read our review of "Sing, Unburied, Sing"

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the evolution of beauty: how darwin's forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world -- and us (book)

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locking up our own: crime and punishment in black america (book)

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prairie fires: the american dreams of laura ingalls wilder (book)

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In her follow-up to "Salvage the Bones," Ward returns to the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Miss., and the stories of ordinary people who would be easy to classify dismissively into categories like "rural poor," "drug-dependent," "products of the criminal justice system.

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The best books about Paris | Sylvia Whitman's favourite Paris reads | Time Out Paris

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The best books about Paris | Sylvia Whitman's favourite Paris reads | Time Out Paris

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When it comes to inspiration for Paris-based titles, the bookseller and manager at Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Whitman, is spoilt for choice. 'I was born here,' she says, 'so it's not much of a surprise to return. Coming back, all the smells (pain au chocolat, the metro, the donkeys in the Luxembourg Gardens) were all familiar so it felt like coming home. T.S. Eliot claimed the chief danger about Paris is that it is such a strong stimulant. And there is something that quickens the heart here that I haven't found elsewhere.'

When not overseeing the bookshop, Sylvia is currently enjoying the Coutume Instituutti in the Finnish Cultural Centre. 'Finally, some good coffee and a relaxed ambiance in what has become a touristy quartier! When I say good coffee, I mean really good coffee.'

What Sylvia's reading right now:

'As I imagine anyone who works in a bookshop knows, it's difficult not to take home a book a day. I like to dip into different genres at the same time so... for fiction, ' The Last Word' by Hanif Kureishi. Very, very funny. About a fading author and his biographer and ultimately how to write about a life. For non-fiction, ' Farmageddon' by Philip Lymbery; an eye-opening account of the true cost of cheap meat. An exploration of the mad system we have - from the antiobiotics fed to animals to bees being trucked across the States - it makes you question a lot of things. And for memoir, ' Inside a Pearl' by Edmund White - immerse yourself in Paris in the 80s. Elegantly written, White writes about coming to Paris unaware of the language or its people and quickly falling in love with it while meeting lots of glamorous, eccentric characters along the way.'

Sylvia's recommended Paris reading:

'Paris' by Julian Greene
Each chapter reads like a beautiful portrait of a secret corner of the city.

'The Dud Avocado' by Elaine Dundy
I just want to join Sally Jay Gorce on one of her chaotic, hilarious and frankly bizarre days (and nights) in bohemian Paris.

'Down and Out in Paris and London' by George Orwell
If you're drawn to the dirty side of Paris then this is for you. Orwell wrote about the bedbugs so we could enjoy the history without enduring the bites!

'The Mandarins' by Simone de Beauvoir
An intimate portrayal of post-Occupation Paris and both the personal and political trials faced by newly liberated Parisians by one of the era's most prominent voices.

'My Life in France' by Julia Child
A beautiful recollection of food, joy and Paris (as well as the rest of France); Child's love of the city breathes through every page of this breezy read.

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When it comes to inspiration for Paris-based titles, the bookseller and manager at Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Whitman, is spoilt for choice. 'I was born here,' she says, 'so it's not much of a surprise to return. Coming back, all the smells (pain au chocolat, the metro, the donkeys in the Luxembourg Gardens) were all familiar so it felt like coming home.

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David Rock

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Your Brain at Work is the NeuroLeadership Institute's blog for all things thought leadership.

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Circular Therapeutics: Giving Therapy a Healing Heart: Hillary Keeney, Bradford Keeney: 9781934442432: Amazon.com: Books

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Circular Therapeutics: Giving Therapy a Healing Heart: Hillary Keeney, Bradford Keeney: 9781934442432: Amazon.com: Books

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circular therapeutics: giving therapy a healing heart

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Circular Therapeutics: Giving Therapy a Healing Heart

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In their most recent book, Circular Therapeutics, Brad and Hillary Keeney encourage therapists to let go and free themselves from the imprisonment of any and all models of therapy and instead become wisdom-based practitioners with healing hearts. Through circular therapeutics, utilization, and im...

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Steps to an Ecology of Mind - Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (Paperback, New edition): Gregory Bateson: 9780226039053 | Books | Buy online in South Africa from Loot.co.za

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Steps to an Ecology of Mind - Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (Paperback, New edition): Gregory Bateson: 9780226039053 | Books | Buy online in South Africa from Loot.co.za

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Steps to an Ecology of Mind - Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (Paperback, New edition): Gregory Bateson: 9780226039053 | Books | Buy online in South Africa from Loot.co.za

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Steps to an Ecology of Mind - Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (Paperback, New edition) / Author: Gregory Bateson ; 9780226039053 ; Western philosophy, from c 1900 -, Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present, Western philosophy, Philosophy, Humanities, Books

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Walter Hopps, the pioneering art curator who died at 72 in 2005, never finished his life story. But he was working on it.

"The Dream Colony" is a memoir based on more than a hundred hours of taped conversations between Hopps and the artist and writer Anne Doran. Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker, completed the book using those tapes and other sources - the original intention was for Treisman and Hopps to work closely together on the finished product.

In the book, Hopps recounts his precocious childhood; his time as a curator in California, championing work by Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, among others; and his role in creating the Menil Collection in Houston, which opened in 1987. (Those readers, like me, who consider the Menil Collection one of their favorite places will be somewhat disappointed that Hopps didn't get around to speaking more fully about those years.)

Intimate recollections include the many meals Hopps had at Cornell's house in Queens. When Hopps told Cornell that he could arrange for him to meet Susan Sontag, Cornell "had to go upstairs and lie down, he was so emotional," Hopps recalled. Cornell later "gave me a collage he'd made that was an imaginary portrait of Susan as a young girl, holding a sheep."

In a warm introduction, the artist Ed Ruscha writes about Hopps: "I don't see anybody on the horizon that even comes close to him."

Quotable

"If I believe in anything when it comes to writing, and I can't stress enough that I detest writing, it's something that sticks with me not from any English class but from some awfully recondite driver's ed seminars. . . . It's the term 'right of way.' The writer, as I see it, has the right of way, so it's up to the reader to look out." - Gary Lutz, in an interview with The Rumpus

The Obama Chronicles

Peter Baker, The Times's chief White House correspondent, has just published "Obama: The Call of History," an oversize, lavishly illustrated look back at Barack Obama's presidency. The book begins with a prologue set last January, when "the country he had hoped to transform was on the verge of replacing him with someone who was his polar opposite in temperament, philosophy and goals."

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Walter Hopps, the pioneering art curator who died at 72 in 2005, never finished his life story. But he was working on it. "The Dream Colony" is a memoir based on more than a hundred hours of taped conversations between Hopps and the artist and writer Anne Doran.

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Our apologies. An error occurred while setting your user cookie. Please set your browser to accept cookies to continue.

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Paris Review - David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204

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Paris Review - David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204

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American poetry is a great literature, and it has come to its maturity only in the last seventy years; Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the last century were rare examples of genius in a hostile environment. One decade gave America the major figures of our modern poetry: Wallace Stevens was born in 1879, and T. S. Eliot in 1888. To the ten years that these dates enclose belong H. D., Robinson Jeffers, John Crowe Ransom, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore.

Marianne Moore began to publish during the First World War. She was printed and praised in Europe by the expatriates T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In Chicago, Harriet Monroe's magazine Poetry, which provided the enduring showcase for the new poetry, published her too. But she was mainly a poet of New York, of the Greenwich Village group which created magazines called Others and Broom.

To visit Marianne Moore at her home in Brooklyn, you had to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, turn left at Myrtle Avenue, follow the elevated for a mile or two, and then turn right onto her street. It was pleasantly lined with a few trees, and Miss Moore's apartment was conveniently near a grocery store and the Presbyterian church that she attended.

The interview took place in November 1960, the day before the presidential election. The front door of Miss Moore's apartment opened onto a long narrow corridor. Rooms led off to the right, and at the end of the corridor was a large sitting room that overlooked the street. On top of a bookcase that ran the length of the corridor was a Nixon button.

Miss Moore and the interviewer sat in her sitting room, a microphone between them. Piles of books stood everywhere. On the walls hung a variety of paintings. One came from Mexico, a gift of Mabel Dodge; others were examples of the heavy, tea-colored oils that Americans hung in the years before 1914. The furniture was old-fashioned and dark.

Miss Moore spoke with an accustomed scrupulosity, and with a humor that her readers will recognize. When she ended a sentence with a phrase that was particularly telling, or even tart, she glanced quickly at the interviewer to see if he was amused, and then snickered gently. Later Miss Moore took the interviewer to an admirable lunch at a nearby restaurant. She decided not to wear her Nixon button because it clashed with her coat and hat.

INTERVIEWER

Miss Moore, I understand that you were born in St. Louis only about ten months before T. S. Eliot. Did your families know each other?

MARIANNE MOORE

No, we did not know the Eliots. We lived in Kirkwood, Missouri, where my grandfather was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. T. S. Eliot's grandfather-Dr. William Eliot-was a Unitarian. We left when I was about seven, my grandfather having died in 1894, February 20. My grandfather, like Dr. Eliot, had attended ministerial meetings in St. Louis. Also, at stated intervals, various ministers met for luncheon. After one of these luncheons my grandfather said, "When Dr. William Eliot asks the blessing and says, 'and this we ask in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,' he is Trinitarian enough for me." The Mary Institute, for girls, was endowed by him as a memorial to his daughter Mary, who had died.

INTERVIEWER

How old were you when you started to write poems?

MOORE

Well, let me see, in Bryn Mawr. I think I was eighteen when I entered Bryn Mawr. I was born in 1887, I entered college in 1906. Now, how old would I have been? Can you deduce my probable age?

INTERVIEWER

Eighteen or nineteen.

MOORE

I had no literary plans, but I was interested in the undergraduate monthly magazine, and to my surprise (I wrote one or two little things for it) the editors elected me to the board. It was my sophomore year-I am sure it was-and I stayed on, I believe. And then when I had left college I offered contributions (we weren't paid) to the Lantern, the alumnae magazine. But I didn't feel that my product was anything to shake the world.

INTERVIEWER

At what point did poetry become world-shaking for you?

MOORE

Never! I believe I was interested in painting then. At least I said so. I remember Mrs. Otis Skinner asking at commencement time, the year I was graduated, "What would you like to be?"

"A painter," I said.

"Well, I'm not surprised," Mrs. Skinner answered. I had something on that she liked, some kind of summer dress. She commended it-said, "I'm not at all surprised."

I like stories. I like fiction. And-this sounds rather pathetic, bizarre as well-I think verse perhaps was for me the next best thing to it. Didn't I write something one time, "Part of a Poem, Part of a Novel, Part of a Play"? I think I was all too truthful. I could visualize scenes, and deplored the fact that Henry James had to do it unchallenged. Now, if I couldn't write fiction, I'd like to write plays. To me the theater is the most pleasant, in fact my favorite, form of recreation.

INTERVIEWER

Do you go often?

MOORE

No. Never. Unless someone invites me. Lillian Hellman invited me to Toys in the Attic, and I am very happy that she did. I would have had no notion of the vitality of the thing, have lost sight of her skill as a writer if I hadn't seen the play; would like to go again. The accuracy of the vernacular! That's the kind of thing I am interested in, am always taking down little local expressions and accents. I think I should be in some philological operation or enterprise, am really much interested in dialect and intonations. I scarcely think of any that comes into my so-called poems at all.

INTERVIEWER

I wonder what Bryn Mawr meant for you as a poet. You write that most of your time there was spent in the biological laboratory. Did you like biology better than literature as a subject for study? Did the training possibly affect your poetry?

MOORE

I had hoped to make French and English my major studies, and took the required two-year English course-five hours a week-but was not able to elect a course until my junior year. I did not attain the requisite academic stand of eighty until that year. I then elected seventeenth-century imitative writing-Fuller, Hooker, Bacon, Bishop Andrewes, and others. Lectures in French were in French, and I had had no spoken French.

Did laboratory studies affect my poetry? I am sure they did. I found the biology courses-minor, major, and histology- exhilarating. I thought, in fact, of studying medicine. Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested, drawing and identifying, liberate-at least have some bearing on-the imagination, it seems to me.

INTERVIEWER

Whom did you know in the literary world, before you came to New York? Did you know Bryher and H. D.?

MOORE

It's very hard to get these things seriatim. I met Bryher in 1921 in New York. H. D. was my classmate at Bryn Mawr. She was there, I think, only two years. She was a nonresident and I did not realize that she was interested in writing.

INTERVIEWER

Did you know Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams through her? Didn't she know them at the University of Pennsylvania?

MOORE

Yes. She did. I didn't meet them. I had met no writers until 1916, when I visited New York, when a friend in Carlisle wanted me to accompany her.

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David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204

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Mitchell in 2010. The early life of David Mitchell, spent in the town of Malvern in Worcestershire, England, was ordinary and uneventful-as he puts it, “white, straight, and middle-class.” Things got more exciting when, at twenty-four, he fell in love with a Japanese woman...

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Amazon.com: The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (9780062262264): Neil Gaiman: Books

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Amazon.com: The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (9780062262264): Neil Gaiman: Books

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BBC - Reading EuropeSeven European bestsellers you should read in 2017

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BBC - Reading EuropeSeven European bestsellers you should read in 2017

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Be warned, these books might take over your life - in fact, some workplaces in Norway have "Knausgaard-free days", because his fans are so obsessed with his books that they can't talk about anything else. A Death in the Family is the first in a series of six novels which are closely based on Knausgård's own life, and you'll smile at his memories of being a teen goth, and cry as he explores what it's like to lose the father he sometimes struggled to connect with. His dedication to detail pegs him with some of the 20th-century greats - fans of Martin Amis and Raymond Carver will find lots to love.

Look out for: Young Karl's musical musings - if it doesn't send you hunting for your own old vinyl, you'll find yourself on Spotify composing your own sonic trip down memory lane.
You can hear Karl Ove Knausgård's A Death in the Family from 9 January 2017 on Radio 4.
Denmark: The Buddhist by Dorthe Nors

To call Nors "quirky" does her a disservice, but her short story collection, Karate Chop, is full of quirks. Her stories are sweet, dark and unexpected, and take you in directions that are always surprising and sometimes shocking. Nors covers dark, difficult themes with a blackly comic sensibility, but there's always a degree of warmth in her words. The Buddhist is about a worker who decides to find religion following a spiritual crisis - if you've got a mate who "found themselves" after a week in Goa, you'll find it painfully relatable.

Look out for: The hilariously awkward hero attempting to stop thinking horrible things about his fellow man. Tom Hanks is better at being an adult in Big than our hero is at being sufficiently spiritual.
You can hear Dorthe Nors' The Buddhist from New Year's Day 2017 on BBC Radio 4.

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BBC - Reading EuropeSeven European bestsellers you should read in 2017

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Be warned, these books might take over your life - in fact, some workplaces in Norway have "Knausgaard-free days", because his fans are so obsessed with his books that they can't talk about anything else.

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30 years of Culture: what are the top five Iain M Banks novels? | Books | The Guardian

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30 years of Culture: what are the top five Iain M Banks novels? | Books | The Guardian

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Our first image of Iain M Banks's Culture universe is a man drowning in sewage: a stark precedent for what was to come. And 30 years after its first publication, Consider Phlebas remains a novel grimily opposed to the shiny rocketships and derring-do of most space opera. Banks broke the genre apart, and with a little inspiration from M John Harrison and Ursula Le Guin (and some outright theft from Larry Niven), he created a series of space opera novels that remains unmatched.

But for all his mastery of high-octane action sequences, and the sheer invention of his Big Dumb Objects, Banks's science fiction - credited to M Banks, his fiction going without the middle initial - has lasted because his deft balance of galactic scope with human-scale stories. Stories of loss, grief, rebirth and self-discovery are the core of the best Culture novels. He did not write sci-fi and literary novels - he was a master of storytelling that combined both.

These are my top five Culture novels, but I wish have included at least five more. I'd put Use of Weapons at six, which might perplex fans of Banks at his most gung-ho. Seven would be short-story collection The State of the Art, which contains only brief glimpses of the Culture. Matter (eight), Inversions (nine) and Surface Detail (10) all have their own strengths, but lack the genius of Banks at his best - which I think you'll find here:

Five: The Hydrogen Sonata

The final published Culture novel was a return to top form for Banks. The Gzilt are ready to "sublime" to the the next plane of existence. But first some old scores must be settled. It's the most openly satirical of all Banks's SF novels, offering an angry critique of "third-way" liberal leaders like Tony Blair. But the star of the show is the Mistake Not, a Culture ship of "non-standard" type IE packing lots of high-level weaponry. It shows exactly how tough the utopian Culture can be.

Four: Excession

Minds - sentient thinking computers - are the secret stars of the Culture novels, but here they take centre stage. What do virtually immortal, super intelligent AIs do for fun? Among other things they play out decades-long plots to topple less developed, more barbaric civilisations. But even Minds sometimes run up against opponents they can't outwit. Featuring the Affront, a race literally named for how outrageously evil they are, this is Banks at his most playful, comedic and inventive.

Three: Consider Phlebas

After almost drowning the hero in sewage in it's opening scene, the first published Culture novel goes on a rip roaring killing spree across the major sights of the Banksian universe. Space pirates, ringworlds, cannibal cultists, a lethal card game, and a Planet of the Dead... the Culture is shown through the eyes of those who hate and fear this machine lead society, creating by far the darkest of all Banks's science fiction writing.

Two: The Player of Games

Both a love poem to the joy of game play, and a warning against the psychology of the game player, the story of the Culture's best gameplayer, who is on a quest to compete against an alien society where games decide real world hierarchies, is the most complete and accessible book in the Culture series. This makes it a good starting point for the Iain M Banks neophyte, and also the first book I recommend to non-science fiction readers curious about the genre.

One: Look to Windward

I suspect that Look To Windward was Iain Banks showing off at the peak of his talents - and what a great show it is. The meddling Culture have accidentally set off a caste war in a civilisation they were trying to liberate. A young, high born officer, maimed in battle and broken by grief, is manipulated to commit a terrorist attack in revenge against the culture. Meanwhile, an exiled composer creates a symphony to mark the light of an ancient super-nova, seen at two points and six centuries apart, by the immortal Mind who blew the star up. The fact that half the cast are six limbed tiger-like predators somehow only adds to the poetry. Look to Windward is where Banks's interleaving of science fiction imagery, and literary themes,reaches it's own symphonic climax, making it not just the greatest Culture novel, but perhaps the greatest ever science fiction novel.

What are your favourite Iain M Banks novels? Let us know in the comments below.
Topics

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30 years of Culture: what are the top five Iain M Banks novels?

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Our first image of Iain M Banks's Culture universe is a man drowning in sewage: a stark precedent for what was to come. And 30 years after its first publication, Consider Phlebas remains a novel grimily opposed to the shiny rocketships and derring-do of most space opera.

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1. Neil Gaiman:The View from the Cheap seats
2. Mary Oliver: Upstream
3. Moonglow: Michael Chabon
4. Liu Cixin: The Three-Body Problem
5. Karl Ove: Knausgård’s A Death in the Family

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5 tips to read a book a day every day - Business Insider

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5 tips to read a book a day every day - Business Insider

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Oscar Wilde once said, "It's what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."

The most successful people in the world make time to read, study, and learn far beyond their grade school years. In turn, they're better thinkers, innovators, and leaders.

With infinite knowledge from books at our disposal, there are simply too many great works out there to read just a handful a year, or even a month. Perhaps we can challenge ourselves to read one book a day.

Here are five tips for starting and finishing a book a day, every day:

1. Listen to white noise while reading.

Entrepreneur Emerson Spartz told Business Insider that when he began home-schooling himself at age 12 while he worked on his Harry Potter fan site, Mugglenet, his parents gave him one requirement: to read four short biographies a day. A few years later he gave himself a similar goal of reading one non-fiction book a day.

How did he do it? He listened to white noise on his headphones. Spartz says it can help anyone read 30% to 200% faster because it eliminates distractions.

2. Try an audiobook.

If you're a commuter, audiobooks can be a great way to make use of your travel. Listening to books via iBooks, Audible, etc. is a wonderful antidote to simply not having the time to stop and read.

A Quora thread examined the time it takes to read a book versus listen to a book. Users discovered that although the average word per minute read is lower by an audiobook narrator than oneself ( the average adult reads 300 wpm), the benefits are higher. One user said the medium of an audiobook allows him to "read" while multitasking and, thus, finish more books than he would the traditional way.

There are a myriad of scenarios where audiobooks reign: while cleaning the house, cooking dinner, driving, or even exercising.

3. Alternate between genres.

One of the easiest ways to keep the flow of reading steady is to alternate between fiction and non-fiction books. Reading fiction is often lost on career-focused people, but it can be a fun way to think about different business scenarios. Plus, studies suggest reading fiction increases prosocial behavior.

One day, you could pick up Harper Lee's latest novel " Go Set a Watchman," and the next buzz through classic business book " How to Win Friends and Influence People."

4. Always carry your book with you.

It's easy in 2015 to turn to your smartphone to pass the time, but you'll likely get more long-term value from reading a book than your Facebook newsfeed.

Whether you prefer your books on an e-reader or you like them in physical form, carrying your current read with you throughout your daily routine can be the reminder you need to crack it open. When it's sitting in your bag it's easy to reach on the subway, train, or even in the impossibly long lunch-hour line at Chipotle.

5. Have your next book ready.

Once a week, make a trip to the bookstore (virtual or actual) and choose a new crop of books for the week. It's the easiest way to stay on track with a reading schedule because you won't be stuck wondering what you'll pick up next.

Sites like Goodreads and What Should I Read Next? make it simple to curate lists to consult when you're ready for new titles. The former also allows you to see what your favorite authors and others in your network are reading.

Bonus: Learn to speed read.

It's obvious that if you're reading faster, you're finishing books faster. But are you retaining what you've read? Speed reading is not only a way of ripping your way through reading material; the best speed readers have mastered the method of equal parts speed and comprehension. Find out how in the video below.

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Oscar Wilde once said, "It's what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it." The most successful people in the world make time to read, study, and learn far beyond their grade school years. In turn, they're better thinkers, innovators, and leaders.

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President Obama’s Reading List - The New York Times

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President Obama’s Reading List - The New York Times

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The Times's chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, recently sat down with President Obama to ask him about his life as a reader. During the course of the interview, the president praised several books and authors. And he talked about books that he had given his daughter Malia, including "The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez and "The Woman Warrior" by Maxine Hong Kingston. Here are a few other authors he singled out, along with some of his words about them.

Liu Cixin Mr. Obama called the author's "The Three-Body Problem," a three-volume science-fiction novel, "wildly imaginative, really interesting," saying "the scope of it was immense."

Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri Their books, Mr. Obama said, "speak to a very particular contemporary immigration experience. But also this combination of - that I think is universal - longing for this better place, but also feeling displaced and looking backwards at the same time. I think in that sense, their novels are directly connected to a lot of American literature."

Gillian Flynn "There were books that would blend, I think, really good writing with thriller genres. I mean, I thought 'Gone Girl' was a well-constructed, well-written book."

Lauren Groff Mr. Obama enjoyed Ms. Groff's "really powerful" novel "Fates and Furies."

Abraham Lincoln Mr. Obama said, "He is a very fine writer. I'd put the Second Inaugural up against any piece of American writing - as good as anything. One of the great treats of being president is, in the Lincoln Bedroom, there's a copy of the Gettysburg Address handwritten by him, one of five copies he did for charity. And there have been times in the evening when I'd just walk over, because it's right next to my office, my home office, and I just read it."

Toni Morrison "'Song of Solomon' is a book I think of when I imagine people going through hardship. That it's not just pain, but there's joy and glory and mystery."

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The Times's chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, recently sat down with President Obama to ask him about his life as a reader. During the course of the interview, the president praised several books and authors.

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WIRED Book Club: Is Three-Body Problem’s Translation Better Than the Original? | WIRED

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WIRED Book Club: Is Three-Body Problem’s Translation Better Than the Original? | WIRED

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Ken Liu is, more than anything, a writer. He's won a number of awards for genre fiction, and his latest book, The Wall of Storms, just dropped this week. But for the purposes of this month's WIRED Book Club, Liu is the translator of The Three-Body Problem, by the hugely popular Chinese writer Liu Cixin. After puzzling through the book's exploration of physics and alien species, we spoke to Liu about how he brought the novel to English-speaking audiences-and how his version might actually be an improvement on the original. Blasphemy, you say? Read on.

What's the difference between translating and writing?
My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is. I spend a huge amount of energy thinking about how to re-create the voice of the author in a different language and for a different culture.

How did you define Liu Cixin's style as you began translating?
I didn't, actually. I don't believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I've never done that. What I do is I absorb Liu Cixin's book. I try to get into it and understand what that voice is.

What challenges did this book present?
One of the things about writing hard sci-fi is that, if you're trying to write speculatively, it's very easy for research to outpace where you are. The Three-Body Problem was published in 2006. By the time I was doing the translation, the original didn't have the latest up-to-date info. So I did the fact-check and wrote to Liu Cixin, and we discussed how we were going to handle it. We changed the text a little bit to address the new research. I'm sure some of it is now outdated again. If we ever do an updated extended edition, perhaps we should fix that.

How would you describe the state of genre fiction in China right now?
That's a question I get asked a lot, and my answer disappoints people. Here's why: If you asked 100 American authors to summarize the state of American genre fiction, you'll get 100 different answers. That's what it's like in China. Labels like "Chinese Science Fiction" or "Western Science Fiction" summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns. If you ask, "Is most Chinese science fiction like Liu Cixin?" the answer is no. If you say, "Do they write completely different than him?" the answer is also no. Because it's just too nuanced to be able to summarize like that.

Contemporary Chinese culture must driving some of that diversity, right?
China is a society undergoing a huge amount of transformation and change. Really, centuries of what we call progress in the West has taken place in China in a matter of two decades. You have some of the most interesting mobile application advancements happening in some of China's big tech cities, but you go just a few hundred kilometers away and you're inside a mountain village where people are so poor that it might as well be 1850. It's not surprising that the science fiction coming out of China is diverse. You have Han Song who writes surreal stories that are very skeptical and challenging to the notion of progress and of Chinese economic development. He is viewing China as a massive dystopia. But then, at the same time, you read Xia Jia, who is a scholar and writes these beautiful stories about how traditional Chinese values nonetheless persist in the technological age-reverence for the elderly, of family persistence, of communitarianism, all these things.

Were there any big changes you made to the translation of The Three-Body Problem?
The first book, as originally published in Chinese, actually comes in a different order. It starts out with the police and army officers asking Professor Wang to join them at the Battle Command Center. All the Cultural Revolution episodes happen as flashbacks. That gave the original Three-Body Problem a very Japanese thriller/detective story kind of feel. But Liu Cixin had always intended for the story to actually start with the Cultural Revolution chapters. He had switched the order only because of concern about whether or not that content would be sensitive. We decided to restore the chapter order, and I like the new structure a lot more. The Cultural Revolution parts are no longer just kind of throwaway flashback exclamations. They are actually the foundation of the story.

It certainly gives American readers footing for the rest of the story ...
That's not how Chinese fans saw it! When I restored the chapter order, a lot of Chinese fans thought that was a mistake. They all thought that starting with the Cultural Revolution would bore American readers.

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WIRED Book Club: Is the Translated Version of 'The Three-Body Problem' Better Than the Original?

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This week, the WIRED Book Club spoke to the book's English translator to find out how he brought Liu Cixin's popular novel to a whole new audience.

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Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.

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Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.

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Pocket: Poetry, love and psychosis: can writing help us come to terms with mental illness?

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Pocket: Poetry, love and psychosis: can writing help us come to terms with mental illness?

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Summer Reading: 20 Mental Health Books That Can Change Your Life | World of Psychology

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Summer Reading: 20 Mental Health Books That Can Change Your Life | World of Psychology

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The summer, a season known for slowing down, is the perfect time for catching up on the books collecting dust on your nightstand and getting a few new reads.

To celebrate the official start of summer - and to give you some ideas - we asked several therapists to share the books that've been especially profound for their clients and themselves.

So, whether you're flying to far-off places, taking a road trip, lounging by the water or just have a few more minutes to yourself, consider adding these potentially life-changing reads to your list.

Bonds that Make Us Free and Leadership and Self-Deception by C. Terry Warner. "[These books] literally changed my life," said Christina G. Hibbert, Psy.D, a clinical psychologist who specializes in women's mental health, postpartum and parenting. (Hibbert also is the author of the forthcoming memoir This Is How We Grow, and she's sharing excerpts from her book here.)
Hibbert frequently uses both books with clients and recommends them to everyone she knows. "They show us a whole new way to view relationships-to see when we are 'in the box,' meaning, not seeing anything but our own thoughts, feelings, and opinions-and how to get 'out of the box'-how to let go and simply love. "

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. "In our culture, we spend so much time nurturing our IQ that we tend to ignore our EQ," according to John Duffy, Ph.D, a clinical psychologist and author of the book The Available Parent: Radical Optimism for Raising Teens and Tweens. But it's our emotional intelligence that contributes greatly to making us successful in all areas of our lives, including work and relationships, he said. "The book is simple and easy to understand, and priceless."

The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford. This book is a staple in Hibbert's therapy sessions. "I use the exercises with clients all the time to help them see their 'light' and 'dark' sides and learn to lovingly embrace both while continually improving."

Being and Loving by Althea Horner. In his practice, clinical psychologist Ryan Howes, Ph.D, regularly sees "the conflict between being a whole self and being in intimate relationships with other people." This book, he said, gives readers guidance on what to do about this common conflict.

The Power of Now and by Eckhart Tolle. Hibbert described both books as "game changers, teaching us how to embrace our spiritual selves, be present in each moment, and let go of our 'ego,' thereby choosing to let go of all that causes us pain."

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. Howes's clients have told him that this book is a "user's manual for life." "It helps people distinguish being loved from being needed, and contributes a spiritual element that is missing from many self-help books."

Driven to Distraction by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey. Joyce Marter, LCPC, a therapist and owner of the counseling practice Urban Balance, has recommended this book to countless clients with ADHD. She worked with one client in particular who spent many years undiagnosed and labeled as lazy, unreliable and underachieving. In addition to ADHD, he also struggled with low self-esteem and depression.
This book, along with therapy and medication, helped him heal his depression, feel better about himself, improve his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, and find a career that suits his strengths. "The case examples and practical suggestions [in the book] were normalizing, validating and structuring in developing a new way of managing his time, possessions and even his relationships."

Chosen by a Horse by Susan Richards. Deborah Serani, Psy.D, a clinical psychologist and author of the book Living with Depression, suggested this book to "adults who are starting over or setting up a new chapter in their lives."

The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook by Edmund J. Bourne. "With exercises on relaxation, visualization, breathing, thought management, and so forth, this book takes the reader through practical, hands-on techniques to help them overcome anxiety, worry, and fears," Hibbert said.

Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend. Howes works with many Christian clients who believe they need to deplete themselves in order to be a good partner, parent, friend and Christian. "This book does a great job of using Biblical teachings to help people prioritize their own self-care and say 'no' when they should."

Darkness Visible by William Styron. According to Serani, "[this] is a short but textured read about unipolar disorder, otherwise called major depression."

The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. This was Hibbert's favorite read of the year, which even inspired her therapy group on personal growth. It teaches readers how to be open in our lives and allow ourselves to experience the negative emotions that hold us back.

Codependent No More by Melody Beattie. Both Howes and Marter recommended this book. It was specifically life-changing for Marter's client who spent years trying to control her husband's drinking, to no avail. This book helped her realize that she needed to focus on her own behaviors, instead of her husband's. She stopped her codependent behaviors and poured her efforts into her powerful work in therapy and Al-Anon.
"The result was a new life of healthy detachment, self-care and boundaries that resulted in a well-planned intervention, then a divorce, and finally a rebirth into a life of empowerment, peace and wellness."

This book isn't just helpful for addiction, but "is relevant to anybody with extreme caretaking tendencies with another adult who may be suffering from depression, narcissism or other mental health issues," added Marter, who also pens the Psych Central blog " The Psychology of Success in Business."

A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer. Serani said this book "is a must read for anyone moving through the trauma of child abuse."

The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman. Hibbert uses the book with all her couples clients. "Learning to speak each other's 'language' is one of the single best methods I've learned to immediately improve intimate and marital relationships, and also parent-child, family, and, basically, all types of relationships."

Electroboy by Andy Berhman. Serani recommended this book for anyone who'd like to better understand bipolar disorder.

Facing the Fire by John Lee. Howes, who also authors the blog In Therapy, recommends this book to his male clients who struggle with anger. "Lee describes why we need anger, why we avoid it, and how to express it constructively. It's direct and practical, and uses jargon-free language to help people use anger to help rather than destroy."

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. "[This] is one of my favorite books of all time," Hibbert said. "Dr. Frankl's memoir of surviving a Nazi concentration camp, this book is completely inspiring, teaching us to discover the meaning and purpose in life, no matter what challenges we face.

Which books resonate with you?
Which books are on your summer reading list?

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emotional intelligence by daniel goleman

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Summer Reading: 20 Mental Health Books That Can Change Your Life | World of Psychology

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The summer, a season known for slowing down, is the perfect time for catching up on the books collecting dust on your nightstand and getting a few new reads. To celebrate the official start of summer -- and to give you some ideas -- we asked several therapists to share the books that've been especially profound for their clients and themselves.

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8 of Psychology’s Greatest Books from the Classics to Today | Psychology Today

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8 of Psychology’s Greatest Books from the Classics to Today | Psychology Today

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The psychology section of any bookstore, from the online superstores to your favorite neighborhood nook, covers an enormously wide range of topics and interests. You've undoubtedly got your own top 10 list of best books in psychology, but if you're looking to expand your knowledge of the area, see how mine compares with yours.

My criteria for selecting these 8 books were that they are widely available, in libraries or inexpensively for you to own (if not available for free), and that they represent the diversity of the field. I wanted to include some historically important works as well as contemporary writings that are sure to become classics in the coming years. These were also books that I felt changed my own view of the field and my understanding of some of its fundamental concepts, so there's a personal slant reflected in this list as well. With that in mind, let's get started!
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
It was inevitable that I would start with the psych classic of all time, Freud's great work that some believe to have given psychology its impetus to become a household world. This book is not an easy read by any means, as Freud's brilliance was not only in his analytical mind but in the breadth of his intellectual interests. You won't find a simple set of "how-to's" to figure out the meaning of your own personal dreams by reading this work, either. Instead, you'll gain insight into the processes that produced Freud the psychoanalyst and would eventually lead to his charting the paths of the id, ego, and superego through development.

There are, however, plenty of entertaining stories mixed in with Freud's philosophical analyses. He relates his own and the dreams of others in considerable details, showing how he proceeds through what we now know as free association to understanding their meaning to the dreamer. Once you read even a few pages, you'll see why, unlike the myth, you can't just plug a dream into a formula and expect to come out with its meaning.
Charles M. Duhigg, The Power of Habit (2012)
After reviewing this book when it first was published, I felt that despite having taught the psychology of learning for my entire career, I was able to grasp the field in an entirely new way from this great book. Sure, everyone in psychology, from the intro psych student to the most highly-regarded researcher knows about classical conditioning. We've all learned of its role in cuing our most desirable, but often most undesirable, actions, addictions, and thoughts. But it's not always easy to see how these behavioral principles apply to our everyday behaviors.

Duhigg identifies the basic process that links cue to habit and shows how it plays out in our common everyday lives. Why do you crave a cookie break at 2:30 every afternoon? Why is it that you can't walk through a shopping mall without having the fight the desire to walk into Cinnabon? How about your inability to stop online gaming, shopping, or Facebook-checking?

You'll have to read the book for yourself to find out what how this simple, basic, process works. Once you do, not only will you recognize yourself in many of the examples he provides of addicted behaviors, but you'll also learn how to take those habits, bend them, and eventually break them forever. Of course, we can't always shake some of these addictions on our own, but by understanding what causes them, you'll gain important insights that will help you seek, and make, the changes you desire on a more permanent basis.
Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937)
So, when you saw this title, did you think "of our time" must surely be now? Though published in 1937, obviously neurotic personalities have always existed and most likely will continue to exist well into the future. It's quite likely that because she was translating her theory into pop terms that she (or her publisher) advised her to add the "of our time" to give it a self-help twist.

The basic premise of Horney's theory indeed has universality. We develop what she called a "false self" in order to cover up our own feelings of anxiety and insecurity. You may, for example, feel that you're not as smart as the other people around you, but you don't want to let on so you put on the airs of someone who feels superior and confident. Not only do you become psychologically dishonest, but eventually you lose sight of who you truly are. Additionally, you may actually lose out on opportunities for advancement that could build your self-esteem. Let's say that you're afraid of failing a test that you're being given at school or on the job. You put off and put off the studying you need to do for this test, so that when you inevitably fail at it, you can say it was because you didn't study. These self-defeating behaviors are, to Horney, the core of neurotic behavior. Your only hope is to allow your real self and false self eventually to come more into line so that you can accept yourself, flaws and all.
Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking (2012)
If all this focus on happiness in today's pop psych is getting to you, then you'll definitely be happy when you read about its antidote. This was another book I read and reviewed that had a powerful impact on me. It's not that I'm a negative psychologist by any means, but I agree with Burkeman that there's more to psychological health than feeling happy-in-the-moment. If those ephemeral and fleeting moments of joy become your goal in life not only are you destined to become the opposite of happy, but you'll also be missing out on the opportunity to gain true fulfillment.

Apart from agreeing with Burkeman's basic thesis, I also found myself contemplating, in the years since reading it, the benefits of mental cleansing that he describes as the path to gaining greater underlying appreciation of life. Burkeman went on a journey that I most likely will never have the chance to do in which he entered a meditation retreat for where, detached from the outer world, he and his fellow journeyers explored their own inner lives. You can follow Burkeman, as did I, through this experience and perhaps you'll emerge with a new awareness of how a bit of realistic pessimism might be a good thing after all.
Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols (1964)
Jung's take on psychology definitely veered toward the spiritual. Although the theory became the basis for one of the most widely use (and abused) tests (see Adam Grant's and my blog posts on the topic), it was Jung's insights into our cultural icons, or what he called "archetypes" that may have been his greatest contribution. This book is appropriately illustrated with images so that the reader can understand Jung's analysis of their symbolic meaning.

Another interesting feature of this book, for me, was his exploration of the notion of "synchronicity." He describes dreams that his patients relayed to him in which the events reportedly foretold later experiences that would actually occur, leading one to die and the other to be the victim of an assault.

Even if you don't buy his theory, you'll still gain cultural insights that will open your eyes to the psychological meanings of the images we encounter on a daily basis, from brand logos to action heroes. After reading Jung's impressive analyses, you'll never think of Spiderman the same way again.
Gina Perry, Behind the Shock Machine, 2013
The classic Milgram experiments are as a staple in the social psych section of virtually every intro psych course in the world. Instructors and students alike are appalled at the apparent cruelty that average people are ready and able to impose on their fellow humans. I came across Perry's book when it was still available only in Australia, and was delighted that the author was able to get a copy for me to review.

Suffice it to say that after reading the fascinating story that literally goes "behind" the experiment, I never thought about social psych the same way again. Perry uncovers details about Milgram the man that I had never realized nor had most psychologists, I venture to guess.

She also contextualizes his research in the field of social psych at the time (the 1950s-60s) in which researchers concocted elaborate scenarios to try to elicit behaviors out of their unwitting participants that they might never have otherwise shown. Indeed, this is her point about the Milgram studies. Perhaps we're not as evil as he would have had us believe. After reading the book, you can decide for yourself.
Matthew Hutson, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking, 2012
The title alone is enticing enough, but as you start to delve into the irrationality of the human mind, you'll find yourself drawn into more than just a spell. A science writer and Psych Today blogger, Hutson writes in a way that respects the underlying empirical studies that he describes in just enough detail to give the work credibility while also entertaining us with knowledge about our own cognitive foibles. I reviewed the book after reading about it in the New York Times, and it's another one whose message has stuck with me ever since.

By taking readers through the ins and outs of cognitive science, Hutson also provides basic lessons in the experimental method. The book also provides an A-B-C primer for the student of skepticism. You'll undoubtedly recognize your own irrational beliefs among the 7 while at the same time gaining the tools to identify and target ones that Hutson may have as yet left undiscovered.
Susan R. Barry, Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey into Seeing in Three DImensions, 2009
Scientists who write about their own experiences present readers with unique opportunities to understand a phenomenon. Susan Barry, a neuroscientist at Mount Holyoke College (and Psych Today blogger), provides such a perspective to our understanding of depth perception. Every intro psych, if not high school biology, student knows that we need slightly disparate images to reach the two retinas of our eyes in order to see the world in perfect 3-D. Perry had an unusual condition that caused her to be stereoblind from early infancy, meaning that she could not see the world with the depth afforded to the rest of us. Her successful treatment was written up by Oliver Sacks in 2004 as the case of "Stereo Sue," drawing public attention for the first time to her condition.

To appreciate what Barry went through involves learning about the "normal" way that we all perceive depth. You never realize how much you take for granted about navigating the world until you learn about a story such as Barry's. You also don't realize, perhaps, just how tricky the whole process of depth perception can be. There are some great images to illustrate this process along with a few entertaining experiments you can perform yourself. The bottom line is that the brain is far more plastic than we usually give it credit for, and that even what might seem an insurmountable challenge can be overcome.

In summary, if you make it through all 8 of these books, or even just sample 1 or 2, you'll have gained valuable knowledge. You'll have a sense of where psychology has come from, and where it's likely to head in the years to come as more great books, and psychologists, contribute to our fascinating field.
Please feel free to add your own suggestions to the comments section here, or tweet to me on Twitter Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. 2014 @swhitbo or through my Facebook group, "Fulfillment at Any Age."

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8 of Psychology's Greatest Books from the Classics to Today

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The psychology section of any bookstore, from the online superstores to your favorite neighborhood nook, covers an enormously wide range of topics and interests. You've undoubtedly got your own top 10 list of best books in psychology, but if you're looking to expand your knowledge of the area, see how mine compares with yours.

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My life with Oliver Sacks: ‘He was the most unusual person I had ever known’ | Books | The Guardian

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My life with Oliver Sacks: ‘He was the most unusual person I had ever known’ | Books | The Guardian

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He wrote me a letter. That's how we met. He had read my book, The Anatomist, in proof, and enjoyed it. ("I meant to provide a blurb," but "got distracted and forgot.") This was when I was still in San Francisco - early 2008. This was when people still wrote letters regularly and when one got a letter, sat down and wrote a letter back.

"Dear Mr Hayes - "
" - Dear Dr Sacks..."

Thus, a correspondence between O and me began.

A month later, I happened to be in New York and, at Oliver's invitation, paid a visit. We had lunch at a cafe across the street from his office: mussels, fries, and several rounds of dark Belgian beer. We lingered at the table, talking, well into the afternoon. We found we had something other than writing in common: he, too, was a lifelong insomniac - indeed, from a family of insomniacs. ("It was understood at an early age that one could not sleep without sedation," he told me wryly.)

I had not known - had never considered - whether he was hetero- or homosexual, single or in a relationship. By the end of our lunch, I hadn't come to any firm conclusions on either matter, as he was both very shy and quite formal - qualities I do not possess. But I did know that I was intrigued and attracted. How could one not be? He was brilliant, sweet, modest, handsome, and prone to sudden, ebullient outbursts of boyish enthusiasm. I remember how O got quite carried away talking about 19th-century medical literature, "its novelistic qualities" - an enthusiasm I shared.

We stayed in touch. I sent him photographs I had taken in Central Park of bare tree limbs. I thought they looked like vascular capillaries. With his neurologist's eye, he felt they looked like neurons.

"I am reminded of how Nabokov compared winter trees to the nervous systems of giants," he wrote back.

I was sort of smitten, I had to admit.

Even so, that was that - for then. There was an entire country between us, not to mention 30 years' age difference. My decision to move to New York more than a year later really had nothing to do with Oliver, and I certainly did not have a relationship in mind. I had simply reached a point in my life where I had to get away from San Francisco - and all the memories it held - and start fresh.

But once I moved, O and I started spending time together and quickly got better and better acquainted.

Not long after I moved to New York, Michael Jackson died. O had no idea who Michael Jackson was. "What is Michael Jackson?" he asked me the day after the news - not who but what - which seemed both a very odd and a very apt way of putting it, given how much the brilliant singer had transmuted from a human into an alien being. O often said he had no knowledge of popular culture after 1955, and this was not an exaggeration. He did not know popular music, rarely watched anything on TV but the news, did not enjoy contemporary fiction, and had zero interest in celebrities or fame (including his own). He didn't possess a computer, had never used email or texted; he wrote with a fountain pen. This wasn't pretentiousness; he wasn't proud of it; indeed, this feeling of "not being with it" contributed to his extreme shyness. But there was no denying that his tastes, his habits, his ways - all were irreversibly, fixedly, not of our time.

"Do I seem like I am from another century?" he would sometimes ask me, almost poignantly. "Do I seem like I am from another age?"

"You do, yes, you do."

For me, this was part of the fascination with him. I was seeing a few other men during my first summer in New York, but dates with O were completely different. We didn't go to movies or to MoMA or to new restaurants or Broadway shows. We took long walks in the botanical garden in the Bronx, where he could expatiate on every species of fern. We visited the Museum of Natural History - not for the dinosaurs or special exhibitions but to spend time in the often empty, chapel-like room of gems, minerals, and, especially, the elements - O knew the stories behind the discoveries of every single one. At night, we might walk from the West Village to the East, O talking excitedly nonstop, to have a beer and burger at McSorley's Old Ale House.

I learned that not only had he never been in a relationship, he had also never come out publicly as a gay man. But in a way, he'd had no reason to do so - he hadn't had sex in three-and-a-half decades, he told me. At first, I did not believe him; such a monk-like existence - devoted solely to work, reading, writing, thinking - seemed at once awe-inspiring and inconceivable. He was without a doubt the most unusual person I had ever known, and before long I found myself not just falling in love with O; it was something more, something I had never experienced before. I adored him.

26 August 2012
I, listening to Björk on my iPod; O, reading and writing in his travel journal; We: drinking champagne on a flight to Reykjavík. I look over and see O making a list in his journal. He tells me he is writing out all the elements that are NOT present in the human body:

When I ask, he names each of them, following my finger as I go down the list. He interrupts himself at one point: "They like to be remembered and recited like this." "They?" O nods. He could not look more delighted, and it's not because of the alcohol. Listed separately, under the heading "No or infinitesimal", are the exceptions. He goes on to explain the difference between organic and nonorganic chemistry. I do not - and expect I never will - understand half of what he is saying.

28 August 2012
Björk invited us to her home in Reykjavík for lunch - a remarkable afternoon; O said it best: "Everything was unexpected." The two met a couple of years ago when Björk asked Oliver to appear in a BBC documentary about music, but they had never spent time together socially. And in fact, O knew very little about her work up until shortly before we made this trip. I got a DVD compilation of her music videos and conducted a crash course in Björk for him. O sat on the edge of his bed, inches from the TV screen, as he needs to in order to hear properly, and watched without stirring, mesmerised especially by the visuals, for 90 minutes. Because of his face blindness, which makes it difficult for O to recognise people not only on the street but also in movies and on TV, he'd sometimes ask, "Is that Björk?" or, "Which one is Björk?" A swan dress one minute, robotic gear the next, her constant changing of costumes and hairstyles utterly confounded him, but he was deeply impressed by her artistry.

We pulled into the driveway at the back of Björk's home and I saw her through the kitchen window. She looked to be in the middle of a task, concentrating. A simple hedge fenced the house. There was a child-sized table and chairs in the front yard, the setting for a tea party. We didn't see a path, so we parted a hedge awkwardly and made our way to the front door. She answered. In my memory, she curtsied. Of course she didn't, but her air of modesty and respect in greeting O had that feeling. She ushered us into the dining room, where a table was set.

Björk's hair was up, held by a barrette with blue feathers. She wore a simple tunic made from several different kinds of coloured and patterned fabric; she may have made it herself. She wore white pants under the tunic and wedge sandals. Her face: unlined, no makeup, pretty; eyes the color of jade; lush, jet-black eyebrows, shaped like two feathers.

Björk urged us to sit and eat. The chairs were carved from tree stumps. The tablecloth was embroidered with seashells. On the table: warm, salted mixed nuts in tiny dishes. Almost immediately, she brought out a steaming pan of baked trout, a salad and a bowl of boiled potatoes - "I like it with the skins left on," she said, almost apologetically, "don't you?" O and I nodded.

Conversation was lively. We talked about Iceland, about Oliver's new book, Hallucinations; about her CD, , and her new projects. She told us that she'd recorded Biophilia (its name inspired by Oliver's Musicophilia) in the lighthouse I'd spotted the night before when I was chasing down the sunset. Björk said she had a calendar in the kitchen with the time for the tide going in and out, so they would know when they could get to the lighthouse - and how long they would be "stuck" there while the tide was in. She laughed. "It was really, really good, because it forced me to work; I couldn't leave if I wanted to."

After eating, Björk led us from the table, through a little door, and to the stairs. These were not stairs in any conventional way. Oliver - ever the naturalist - knew exactly: "Why, these are basalt stones! This looks like a stairway carved out of a wall of basalt!" Björk nodded. Adding to this remarkable sight: the railing in the winding stairway was made of whale rib bones. Björk smiled and helped Oliver up. "And this," - she pointed to the shimmering lamp hanging overhead, dropping into the stairwell - "actually my daughter and I made it out of mussel shells. It wasn't supposed to be permanent, but... we like it."

She wandered into an upper room, and we followed. There, she showed us two custom-made instruments, a celeste and what looked like a harpsichord. Both had been modified somehow through instructions from a programme on her Mac. I could tell that O was completely lost as she explained how this worked. Yet it was then, right then, that I realised how much she and O were alike - fellow geniuses, incredibly, intuitively brilliant - while being at the same time such an unlikely pair of friends.

Back downstairs, Björk brought out a gooseberry pie, with berries picked from her own trees. She'd made it with her daughter the night before. "As she was the cook, of course she had to have the first piece," she said, pointing out the missing wedge. She served it topped with fresh, plain skyr, which has a sour bite to it - along with coffee and tea. The tea set was out of Alice in Wonderland - each cup literally half a cup, sliced in half. "I've learned that these are for right-handed people, these teacups," she says, "or I learn who is left-handed by watching them try to drink from them." She giggled.

We finished the pie. I looked at Oliver's watch and saw that it was almost 3.30; we'd been here three hours. Oliver signed an advance copy of Hallucinations -"You will be the only person in all of Iceland with this book" - and I gave her a copy of one of mine. "For Björk, with gratitude," I signed it.

30 December 2012
On a red-eye to Reykjavík for New Year's Eve: Leaving New York, the city looked embroidered in gold thread. Now, clouds and stars, and what sounds like a hymn: "Craving miracles..." Björk sings.

1 January 2013
Supper of skyr, biscuits and tea in our tiny hotel room. Recovering. Snow falling. Last night, a New Year's Eve dinner at Björk's, was like being safely in the middle of a very happy war; a huge bonfire on the beach across the street from her home encircled by people singing; fireworks going off in every direction, from every home, all night long, and culminating in a chaotically beautiful, or beautifully chaotic, fireworks display at midnight in the town square. As if the sky were full of shooting stars. As the church bells pealed 12 times. As the ground was snow-covered, white, the floor of a cloud. As everyone kissed and hugged one another. Bottles of champagne and brennivín, an Icelandic schnapps - clear and strong.

17 February 2013
Oliver and I went to a small chamber orchestra concert at the American Irish Historical Society, a jewel box of a building directly across the street from the Metropolitan Museum. He knows the Irish gentleman who organises these concerts, Kevin. They feature students from Juilliard. Very intimate. Unpretentious. Free of charge. A handful of people in folding chairs - maybe 40. Kevin had saved seats for O and me in the front row. Just as he was making his introductions, a woman rushed in by herself and plopped on to the cushy rose-coloured sofa right next to our seats: Lauren Hutton, the model from the 70s: I recognised her instantly by her gap-toothed smile and slightly crossed eyes. Now in her late 60s, still beautiful, her face naturally lined. And, one couldn't help but notice, she had a big bruiser of a black eye.

The concert began with no further ado, and we all sat back and enjoyed the programme - Brahms, Haydn, Ravel - by these enchanting musicians.

With the final note, Lauren Hutton was the first to pop up and give the trio a standing ovation. "Do you have a fan club?" she yelled above the clapping; it was a little startling, like someone yelling in a church. "I'm starting your fan club. You're fantastic, you're going places!" The musicians bowed shyly and departed.

There was a small reception afterwards. Nothing fancy - two bottles of San Pellegrino and a couple bottles of wine - but no bottle-opener. O and I were talking with Kevin when Lauren Hutton walked up to us: "Do one of you kind gentlemen have an opener? Even a knife would do - I could pry it open with a penknife."

"Why don't you use your teeth?" I said to her.

She laughed and smiled that famous gap-toothed smile. "I could. I could have once, but..." she wandered off. The bottle got opened somehow. Eventually she circled back and poured water for everyone. She overheard Oliver talking to Kevin about his new book, Hallucinations, which was coming out in a couple weeks. Lauren leaned across the table and listened intently.

"Hey doc, you ever done belladonna?" she asked. "Now there's a drug!"

"Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have," and he proceeded to tell her about his hallucinations on belladonna. They traded stories. Eventually she began to figure out that this wasn't his first book.

"Are you - are you Oliver Sacks? The Oliver Sacks?" Oliver looked both pleased and stricken.

"Well, it is very good to meet you, sir." She sounded like a southern barmaid in a 50s western. But it wasn't an act. "I've been reading you since way back. Oliver Sacks - imagine that!"

Oliver, I should note, had absolutely no idea who she was, nor would he understand if I had pulled him aside and told him.

Fashion? Vogue magazine? No idea...

The two of them hit it off. She was fast-talking, bawdy, opinionated, a broad - the opposite of Oliver except for having in common that mysterious quality: charm.

Somewhere along the way, she explained the black eye: a few days earlier, she had walked out of a business meeting at which she'd learned that she had been "robbed" of a third of everything she'd ever earned, and in a daze walked smack into a scaffolding pipe at eye level on the sidewalk. She didn't seem too bothered by it: shit happens.

I looked up and saw that the room was empty by now but for Kevin and us.
"Well, gentlemen, I'm going downtown. Share a cab?"
"Uh, we have a car," I said.
"Even better. Much more civilised. I'm downtown."
How could one refuse? "Let's go, shall we?" I said. Lauren Hutton offered Oliver an arm and we walked slowly to the parking garage. I pushed things out of the way in the back seat; she tossed in her handbag, and dove in. She immediately popped her head between our seats - the three of us were practically ear-to-ear.

Her incredible face blocked my rearview mirror. When O took out his wallet to give me a credit card for the parking, she spotted the copy of the periodic table he carries in lieu of a driver's licence. This prompted a series of questions about the periodic table, the elements, the composition of the very air we were breathing. A dozen questions led to a dozen more, like a student soaking up knowledge. We talked about travels - Iceland, Africa - and Plato, Socrates, the pygmies, William Burroughs, poets... She was clearly intensely curious, life-loving, adventurous. In passing, she said something about having been a model - "The only reason I did it was so I could make enough dough to travel" - but otherwise didn't say anything about that part of her life. Traffic was thick, so it took quite a while to get downtown.

Eventually, we reached her address, or close enough.

"Well, gentlemen, it has been a true pleasure. I cannot thank you enough. This is where I exit. Goodbye - for now." And she was gone, as suddenly as she'd arrived. Oliver took a breath as we headed west and home. "I don't know who that was, but she seems like a very remarkable person."

12 January 2015
Got back last night from St Croix in the US Virgin Islands - a birthday trip. I turned 54 (equivalent to the atomic number for xenon, so O gave me four xenon flashlights). O did not feel well much of the time - nauseated, tired, slept a lot. We almost cancelled the trip, last minute. Two nights before we left, he told me he had "dark urine". I was sceptical - he's hypochondriacal even on good days, as he is the first to admit. But I could see he was worried, talked him into peeing into a clear glass so I could check, and was startled when he brought it into the kitchen; his urine was the colour of Coca-Cola. It seemed to clear up some while we were in St Croix. Even so, he had made a doctor's appointment before leaving for the trip.

Later...
O just returned from his GP, who thinks he has some kind of gallbladder inflammation, maybe gallstones. Did an ultrasound, but they're running more tests.

15 January 2015
O's doctor phoned: "peculiar findings" re: Cat scan yesterday. So: am taking him to see a radiologist at Sloan Kettering. They want to see him this afternoon.

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Oliver's Periodic Table.

Sloan Kettering is a cancer hospital, but cancer had not entered my mind. I was still banking on the possibility of gallstones; I thought, at worst, Oliver might have to have his gallbladder removed. I remember the doctor entering the consulting room with a young medical fellow (he was from Italy, I think), and how nervous the young man looked. The doctor got right to it and told us that he had carefully reviewed the Cat scan and, although a confirmatory biopsy would have to be performed, he was 90% sure of the diagnosis and said he had some "tough" news. I remember that word, "tough". He asked Oliver if he'd like to see the Cat scan. Oliver said yes, of course, and he flipped on the computer monitor.

Later he told me that he knew instantly what the scan said. I did not, and I was stunned when the radiologist explained that what we were looking at was a recurrence of the uveal melanoma Oliver had had nine years earlier - a cancer arising from the pigment cells in his right eye; over time, it had metastasised to his liver, which was now "riddled like Swiss cheese" with tumours. He enlarged the image on the monitor, so the white spots - the tumours - looked as large as those made by a hole punch. In cases like this, with a possibility of the cancer spreading, and at Oliver's age, the doctor said, neither a liver resection nor a liver transplant would be possible. What has stuck with me so clearly is how calmly Oliver took this news. It was as if he was expecting it, as perhaps he was. He sort of tilted his head and stroked his beard and asked about the prognosis, and the doctor said: "Six to 18 months."

"And there's no effective treatment?"

The doctor didn't say no, but he didn't say yes. He explained what could be done, that everything possible would be done, an oncology team was already in place, he'd just gotten off the phone with a specialist, and so on, but Oliver cut him off. He said he was not interested in "prolonging life just for the sake of prolonging life". Two of his brothers had died of different forms of cancer, and both had regretted undergoing horrid chemotherapy treatments that had done nothing but ruin their last months.

"I want to be able to write, think, read, swim, be with Billy, see friends, and maybe travel a bit, if possible." Oliver added that he hoped not to be in "ghastly pain" or for his condition to become "humiliating", and then he fell silent.

The next day, we went swimming at noon, as we always did on Fridays, and then spent a quiet weekend together, taking walks, reading, listening to music, going to the open-air market at Abingdon Square, cooking, both of us trying to absorb the overwhelming news. Oliver consulted with a few colleagues, including the ophthalmologist who had treated his cancer years before; he had had a chance to look at the Cat scan, too. Recurrences such as this were considered extremely rare, yet the consensus seemed to be that the preliminary diagnosis was most likely correct and that treatment options were few.

Over the weekend, Oliver mentioned a few times that he was considering writing "a little piece" about receiving his diagnosis. And on Sunday night, after we had made dinner and cleared the dishes, he took up a small notepad and his fountain pen. "Well, let's see..." He paused. "I suppose I want to begin by saying that a month ago, I felt that I was in good health. But... now my luck has run out..."

"Hold it," I interrupted, "let me get a pen." I did so, and a notepad, and I scribbled what he had just said. "OK, keep going." From there, Oliver dictated the entire essay, nearly verbatim to the version that would eventually appear in the New York Times.

He spent several days tinkering with it but then he set it aside. Oliver worried that his feelings were perhaps too raw, and felt it was too soon to publish it, given that most of his friends and family members did not yet know his news.

In lieu of any experimental treatments, Oliver made the decision to go ahead with a surgical procedure called an embolisation, which would cut off blood supply to the tumours in his liver and therefore kill them off - temporarily (they would inevitably return, he was told). Dramatically lowering the "tumour burden" held the promise of offering him several more months of active life. As we waited in the hospital for him to be admitted for surgery, Oliver suddenly turned to Kate [Edgar, Sacks's long-time friend and collaborator] and me and said he felt the time was right to send the piece over to the New York Times. Neither of us questioned him; we just said, OK. Kate emailed the essay to our mutual editor at the Times, and we heard back almost immediately: They wanted to run the piece the next day. We asked for one extra day - to get Oliver safely through the procedure first - and they agreed. Oliver's essay My Own Life was scheduled for publication on 19 February 2015.

17 February 2015
In post-surgery recovery: cutting off blood supply to the tumours in the liver may sound somewhat benign, but the body revolts with full force against such an intrusion. O repeatedly tears off his hospital gown because he is in so much pain that even the thin cotton material causes discomfort. The young female nurses act scandalised by this and keep trying to cover him up. At one point, O yells out in exasperation: "If one can't be naked in a hospital, where can one be naked?!" I hear a nurse in the hallway join me in laughter. I cover his genitals with a washcloth when the morphine finally kicks in and he falls asleep.

27 February 2015
I brought O a few of the letters and emails written in response to his New York Times essay. I: "How'd it feel to read those?" O: "Good!" I: "You have about 800 more to go." O: "I'd like to see all of them."

22 April 2015
O: "The most we can do is to write - intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively - about what it is like living in the world at this time."

7 July 2015
O, proudly, playing a new Schubert piece, and with great flair demonstrating how it requires "crossed hands". I am quite amazed and impressed, and I clap.

8 July 15
The day before O's 82nd birthday, and we got bad news with his latest Cat scan - bad - much worse than expected. Not only have the tumours regrown, the cancer has spread: kidneys, lungs, skin. O wants to go ahead with his birthday party, and doesn't want people to know. "Auden always said one must celebrate one's birthday," he says.

9 July 2015
O's birthday: at his party - O asks me to go get the bottle of 1948 Calvados - a rare brandy given to him as a gift years ago and sealed in a wooden box. I open it for him. I: "Do you want a glass?" O: "No," he says, and takes a swig, eyes closed. "Lovely," he pronounces and looks around the room. "Who would like some?" Later, he tells me he'd forgotten that he had left the Calvados to a friend in his will.

13 July 2015
Very, very tired, I did the dinner dishes quickly, gathered my things, and earlier than usual, told Oliver I was heading to bed and said good night. But as I headed for the bedroom, O called to me from his desk, "Do you know why I love to read Nature and Science every week?" I turned. "No," I shook my head. I was almost confused; this seemed such a non sequitur. "Surprise - I always read something that surprises me," he said.

25 July 2015
In the country: O is finishing one essay, working on two others - at least two others. "How's the writing going?" I ask, waking from a nap. He smiles mischievously. "I meant to stop, but I couldn't." And he goes back to it. I watch. He doesn't have a fancy desk here; it's just a folding table. All he needs is a pad and his fountain pen and a comfortable chair.

Later, we go for a swim. The water in the pool is a bright emerald green, caused by an excess of copper and iron in the well.

"You are swimming in the elements," I tell O, "swimming in a pool of copper."
"Lovely," he murmurs, doing his backstroke.

1 August 2015
He plays Beethoven - he never used to - long, haunting pieces, complex pieces - whereas he used to only play Bach preludes, and in stops and starts.

10 August 2015
O is working on a new piece: Sabbath. Every now and then, a little request comes, always phrased politely: "If you would be so kind: look up something for me on your little box?" "Little box" is his name for an iPhone, a name he finds too ugly to pronounce, to speak. "It's not even a word," as he points out, "it's a brand." Sometimes he calls the phone my "communicator", as if out of Star Trek. Today, he wants me to look up the meaning of the Latin "nunc dimittis". As is almost always the case with O, it wasn't necessary: he'd had the definition exactly right in the first place: nunc dimittis is "the final song in a religious service".

16 August 2015
"I say I love writing, but really it is thinking I love - that rush of thoughts - new connections in the brain being made. And it comes out of the blue." O smiled. "In such moments: I feel such love of the world, love of thinking..."

23 August 2015
"What are your wishes, Dr Sacks?" said the hospice nurse. "How would you like to pass?" "At home," answered O in a clear, steady voice, "with no pain or discomfort, and with my friends here."

28 August 2015
O, who has had no appetite, suddenly asked to have smoked salmon and Ryvita for lunch. He insisted we get him out of bed, into his "dressing gown", take him to his table, and "to see my piano". We brought a plate to him: with incredible dignity, and slowness, he carefully cut a single piece at a time. He could only eat three bites. And when I suggested something sweet - some ice cream? He said: "No, a pear." He had one slice then asked that we take him back to bed.

29 August 2015
I am at his side, in his bedroom, where Kate and I have been keeping a special watch since 5.30am. That's when Maurine (our hospice nurse) woke me in the other room: "Billy, come now - his breathing has changed." It has slowed to just three or four breaths per minute - long silences in between. He is no longer conscious. He is stretched out on his bed diagonally and looks comfortable. Maurine, who has been at the side of many patients as they die, tells us this is the last phase, but that it could go on for many hours, days maybe. A little while ago, I looked around the room, crowded with bedsheets, towels, pads, medications, an oxygen tank and other medical equipment, and I began clearing it out, all of it. First, I brought in stacks of all of O's books, cleared a bedside table, and put them there. I brought in a cycad plant and a fern. Kate joined me, and we cleared more space, making room on another table for some of O's beloved minerals and elements, his fountain pens, a ginkgo fossil, his pocket watch. Elsewhere, a few books by his heroes - Darwin, Freud, Luria, Edelman, Thom Gunn - and photos - his father, Auden, his mother as a girl with her 17 siblings, his aunts and uncles, his brothers. We brought in flowers, candles. I am heartbroken but at peace. Last night, before getting some sleep, I came in to see if he needed anything.

"Do you know how much I love you?" I said.

"No." His eyes were closed. He was smiling, as if seeing beautiful things.

"A lot."

"Good," O said, "very good."

"Sweet dreams."

Bill Hayes Q&A: 'Conversations and scenes jumped off the page'

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Oliver Sacks, left, and Bill Hayes in 2015. Photograph: Corbis

What made you publish your diaries? Some of the entries are very intimate and personal... why did you want to make them public?
I didn't expect to. I had signed a contract to write a book about New York a long time before Oliver got his diagnosis and initially I had no expectation that I was even going to write about us. But things changed after his death and I began to think about how I would write about my life in New York, my relationship with New York City and my relationship with Oliver. It was then that I went back to my journal, which I had started at Oliver's urging a few weeks after I moved here in 2009. Conversations and scenes just jumped off the page and I realised they could be much more effective at chronicling our lives than if I were to write a more traditional narrative.

The entries that follow the diagnosis of Oliver's cancer are terribly affecting. How difficult were those days for you?
Extremely difficult, heartbreaking at times. But it wasn't a first experience for me [Hayes cared for his previous partner through several Aids-related illnesses before losing him to a heart attack]. As a gay man living in San Francisco in the early 1990s, I had very deep and intimate experience of the Aids epidemic, caring for and losing friends and co-workers at the San Francisco Aids Foundation. That's not to say it made it easier, exactly, caring for Oliver but dying was something I knew about.

How would Oliver have felt about Insomniac City?
I think he would have been delighted and proud. Oliver published his autobiography, , in May 2015, three months before his death. It's very candid and open about his sexual identity and about our relationship. Prior to that, Oliver had never spoken or written at all about his private life and his decision to do so gently opened a door, allowing me to write about my life with him in a way I am not sure I would have or could have had he not done that.

How would you describe Oliver's legacy to the world?
I think there are several legacies. I think he opened up for the world and for all of us conversations about neurodiversity and neurological conditions and how people adapt to them, everything from autism to Tourette syndrome to blindness. I think he also left an amazing legacy in his writing about mortal illness and facing death in his columns in the New York Times. That was, I think, a very generous and gracious act in his final year. And his final legacy is that, while on one level my book is about me reinventing myself in middle age, there's another story there about Oliver Sacks reinventing himself, in his 70s. And I love that. At age 75, he opened his heart up and fell in love, started a new romantic and domestic life with another person - with me - and continued to work so productively - all of which made being old seem adventurous and fun.

What do you miss most about Oliver?
His companionship. I hope the reader gets a sense of what our relationship and conversations were like. We talked and laughed a lot. He was very funny and liked wordplay and puns. He could be very self-deprecating and eccentric. So most of all I miss the comfort of his company and the laughter.
Interview by Lisa O'Kelly

Extract from Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me by Bill Hayes (Bloomsbury £16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

* Bill Hayes will be signing copies of Insomniac City on Monday 3 April at the London Review Bookshop, London WC1, and on Tuesday 4 April at Gay's the Word, also London WC1. He will be giving a talk on 4April to the How to Academy, at the Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design, London W1

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My life with Oliver Sacks: 'He was the most unusual person I had ever known'

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He wrote me a letter. That's how we met. He had read my book, The Anatomist, in proof, and enjoyed it. ("I meant to provide a blurb," but "got distracted and forgot.") This was when I was still in San Francisco - early 2008.

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Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.

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Atom, Archetype, and the Invention of Synchronicity: How Iconic Psychiatrist Carl Jung and Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli Bridged Mind and Matter – Brain Pickings

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Atom, Archetype, and the Invention of Synchronicity: How Iconic Psychiatrist Carl Jung and Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli Bridged Mind and Matter – Brain Pickings

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"Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist," Einstein wrote as he contemplated the human passion for comprehension in the final years of his life. He may well have been thinking about the great Austrian-Swiss theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (April 25, 1900-December 15, 1958), who first postulated the neutrino and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the Pauli exclusion principle - a monumental leap in our understanding of the structure of matter. Decades earlier, 21-year-old Pauli had published a critique of Einstein's groundbreaking theory of general relativity. It greatly impressed the elder physicist, who wrote in astonishment:

No one studying this mature, grandly conceived work could believe that the author is a man of 21. One wonders what to admire most, the psychological understanding for the development of ideas, the sureness of mathematical deduction, the profound physical insight, the capacity for lucid systematic presentation, the complete treatment of the subject matter, or the sureness of critical appraisal.

Indeed, this uncommon fusion of psychological acumen and scientific rigor only intensified as Pauli grew older. Around the time he wrote the paper that spurred Einstein's praise, Pauli became enchanted with the work of pioneering psychologist William James. After a three-decade immersion in it, and several years after he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Pauli met the great psychiatrist Carl Jung (July 26, 1875-June 6, 1961), who in turn was deeply influenced by Einstein's ideas about space and time.

Jung and Pauli struck an unusual friendship, which lasted a quarter century until Pauli's death and resulted in the invention of synchronicity - acausally connected events, which the observer experiences as having a meaningful connection on the basis of his or her subjective situation, a meeting point of internal and external reality.

Although rooted in Pauli's interest in dream analysis, their conversations and correspondence went on to explore fundamental questions regarding the nature of reality through the dual lens of physics and psychology. Each used the tools of his expertise to shift the shoreline between the known and the unknown, and together they found common ground in the analogy between the atom, with its nucleus and orbiting electrons, and the self, with its central conscious ego and its ambient unconscious.

Both men were deeply imprinted by this intellectual cross-pollination. In his posthumously published final work, Jung would write:

We do not know whether what we on the empirical plane regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from the physical as psychic. Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psychic and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience, though this certainly does not justify the arbitrary hypothesis of either materialism or spiritualism.

Pauli's parallel curiosity about mind and matter is perhaps best articulated in by his friend and collaborator Werner Heisenberg - he of uncertainty principle fame - who would later write:

Behind [Pauli's] outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists.

In their conceptually daring correspondence, collected in Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958 (public library), the two delve into these parallels between the physical and psychic dimensions of reality. In one of his early letters, Jung considers the analogy Pauli had proposed between the atomic nucleus and the self. He writes in the autumn of 1935:

Generally speaking, the unconscious is thought of as psychic matter in an individual. However, the self-representation drawn up by the unconscious of its central structure does not accord with this view, for everything points to the fact that the central structure of the collective unconscious cannot be fixed locally but is an ubiquitous existence identical to itself; it must not be seen in spatial terms and consequently, when projected onto space, is to be found everywhere in that space. I even have the feeling that this peculiarity applies to time as well as space... A biological analogy would be the functional structure of a termite colony, possessing only unconscious performing organs, whereas the center, to which all the functions of the parts are related, is invisible and not empirically demonstrable.

The radioactive nucleus is an excellent symbol for the source of energy of the collective unconscious, the ultimate external stratum of which appears an individual consciousness. As a symbol, it indicates that consciousness does not grow out of any activity that is inherent to it; rather, it is constantly being produced by an energy that comes from the depths of the unconscious and has thus been depicted in the form of rays since time immemorial.

[...]

The center, or the nucleus, has always been for me a symbol of the totality of the psychic, as the conscious plus the unconscious, the center of which does not coincide with the ego as the center of consciousness, and consequently has always been perceived as being external.

Over the following few years, their correspondence focuses primarily on dream analysis - which both Jung and Pauli saw as a means of illuminating scientific motifs in Pauli's work - but again and again they return to the symmetry of mind and matter. In a letter to Jung from the summer of 1937, Pauli jeers at the narrow materialism of his own field and calls for an openness to other forms of knowing:

Most modern physics also lends itself to the symbolic representation of psychic processes, even down to the last detail. Of course, nothing is further from the thoughts of modern man than the idea of penetrating the secrets of matter in this way ... since it seems to him that, relatively speaking, less research has been done on the soul, and it is less familiar than matter.

The following summer, 38-year-old Pauli writes:

After a careful and critical appraisal of the many experiences and arguments, I have come to accept the existence of deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time.

In 1947, when Jung decided to found an institute dedicated to this field of research, he asked Pauli - who had received the Nobel Prize a year and a half earlier - to be among its sponsors. The physicist gladly agreed. In a letter to Jung from that December, he noted that the parallels between their interests provide "serious evidence that what is developing is indicative of a close fusion of psychology with the scientific experience of the processes in the material physical world." He peers into that shared future:

It is probably a long journey, one we are only just setting out on, and it will especially entail, as a modifying factor, constant criticism of the space-time concept.

Space and time were virtually turned by Newton into God's right hand (oddly enough, the position made vacant when he expelled the Son of God from there), and it needed an extraordinary mental effort to bring time and space back down from these Olympian heights. Going hand in hand with this, apparently, is the criticism of the basic idea of classical natural science, according to which it describes objective facts to such an extent that there is absolutely no link between them and the researcher (objectifiability of the phenomena independently of the way in which they are observed.)

Four decades before the revered physicist John Archibald Wheeler (who coined the term "black hole") made his influential assertion that "this is a participatory universe [and] observer-participancy gives rise to information," Pauli plants the seed of a grand question:

Modern microphysics turns the observer once again into a little lord of creation in his microcosm, with the ability (at least partially) of freedom of choice and fundamentally uncontrollable effects on that which is being observed. But if these phenomena are dependent on how (with what experimental system) they are observed, then is it not possible that they are also phenomena (extra corpus) that depend on who observes them (i.e., on the nature of the psyche of the observer)? And if natural science, in pursuit of the ideal of determinism since Newton, has finally arrived at the stage of the fundamental "perhaps" of the statistical character of natural laws ... then should there not be enough room for all those oddities that ultimately rob the distinction between "physics" and "psyche" of all its meaning...?

If you turn Pauli's words over in your mind for a few moments, you'd realize just how radical and enormous a proposition this is. Indeed, it was this letter that catalyzed the series of conversations in which Pauli and Jung came up with the concept of synchronicity - the ultimate dependency between the observer and the observed. By the fall of 1948, they were using the term regularly in their correspondence. In a letter from mid-1949, Jung writes to Pauli, enclosing a manuscript of his first paper on the subject:

Quite a while ago, you encouraged me to write down my thoughts on synchronicity... Nowadays, physicists are the only people who are paying serious attention to such ideas.

A few days later, Pauli echoes this faith in interdisciplinary thinking by sharing with Jung one of his great intellectual influences:

The idea of meaningful coincidence - i.e., simultaneous events not causally connected - was expressed very clearly by Schopenhauer in his essay "On the Apparent Design in the Fate of the Individual."

[...]

This essay of Schopenhauer's had a lasting and fascinating effect on me and seemed to be pointing the way to a new trend in natural sciences. But whereas [he] wanted at all costs to cling to the rigid determinism along the lines of the classical physics of his day, we have now acknowledged that in the nuclear world, physical events cannot be followed in causal chains through time and space. Thus, the readiness to adopt the idea on which your work is based, that of the "meaning as an ordering factor," is probably considerably greater among physicists than it was in Schopenhauer's day.

In a subsequent letter from the autumn of 1950, Pauli - who preferred the term "meaning-correspondence" over "synchronicity" as a way of placing greater emphasis on the meaning of events than on their simultaneity - adds:

In truth, nature is so fashioned that - analogous to Bohr's "Complementarity" in physics - any contradiction between causality and synchronically can never be ascertained.... How do the facts that make up modern quantum physics relate to those other phenomena explained by you with the aid of the new principle of synchronicity? First of all, what is certain is that both types of phenomenon go beyond the framework of "classical" determinism.

[...]

I nevertheless, as a physicist, have the impression that the "statistical correspondence" of quantum physics, seen from the point of view of synchronicity, is a very weak generalization of the old causality... Although microphysics allows for an acausal form of observation, it actually has no use for the concept of "meaning."

In the letter, Pauli diagrams the concepts discussed:

Six days later, Jung picks up the thread and crystallizes the definition of synchronicity:

Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which "similar" things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.

With an eye to Pauli's diagram, he considers the role of space and time in synchronicity:

Modern physics, having advanced into another world beyond conceivability, cannot dispense with the concept of a space-time continuum. Insofar as psychology penetrates into the unconscious, it probably has no alternative but to acknowledge the "indistinctness" or the impossibility of distinguishing between time and space, as well as their psychic relativity. The world of classical physics has not ceased to exist, and by the same token, the world of consciousness has not lost its validity against the unconscious... "Causality" is a psychologem (and originally a magic virtus) that formulates the connection between events and illustrates them as cause and effect. Another (incommensurable) approach that does the same thing in a different way is synchronicity. Both are identical in the higher sense of the term "connection" or "attachment." But on the empirical and practical level (i.e., in the real world), they are incommensurable and antithetical, like space and time.

[...]

I would now like to propose that instead of "causality" we have "(relatively) constant connection through effect," and instead of synchronicity we have (relatively) constant connection through contingency, equivalence, or "meaning."

He illustrates this proposition with his own variation on Pauli's diagram:

In a letter sent twelve days later, Pauli responds by introducing the crucial concept of scale into these considerations of synchronicity:

Synchronicity should be defined in a narrower sense so as to comprise effects that only appear when there is a small number of individual cases but disappear when there is a larger number... In quantum physics, there are not just effects that appear with large numbers instead of with small ones, and not only is the term "meaning" not the right one here (which you have written about at great length) but also the concept of the (psychic or psychoid) archetype cannot be used so lightly in the acausalities of microphysics.

In a letter from October of 1953, more than twenty years into their correspondence and a decade into their shared obsession with synchronicity, Jung writes to Pauli:

It means a lot to me to see how our points of view are getting closer, for if you feel isolated from your contemporaries when grappling with the unconscious, it is also the same with me, in fact more so, since I am actually standing in the isolated area, striving somehow to bridge the gap that separates me from the others. After all, it is no pleasure for me always to be regarded as esoteric. Oddly enough, the problem is still the same 2,000-year-old one: How does one get from Three to Four?

Jung and Pauli unfurl many more fascinating parallels between psychology and physics in the remainder of Atom and Archetype. Complement it with Jung on human nature, then revisit physicist, novelist, and poet Alan Lightman on science and transcendence.

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Atom, Archetype, and the Invention of Synchronicity: How Iconic Psychiatrist Carl Jung and Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli Bridged Mind and Matter

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"Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist," Einstein wrote as he contemplated the human passion for comprehension in the final years of his life.