A solid collage of voices to complicate our picture of psychoanalysis.
New essays on Freud’s continuing relevance.
In his latest anthology, after Now Comes Good Sailing, In Their Lives, Central Park, and others, Blauner and his contributors dig into the fraught territory of Freud. Readers will learn that Freud put birthday hats on his chow chows; that he forbade his wife from lighting Sabbath candles (and that she started lighting them again on the first Friday after he died); that Jennifer Finney Boylan once had a psychotherapist who “set [her] back years and years” when she was trying to understand her trans identity; that psychoanalytic sensibility (“spontaneous talk,” attentive listening, personal connection) may be the best antidote we have to an overly curated, stultifying digital culture that threatens to “hollow us out”; that the idea in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a death instinct that holds on to trauma in order not to move forward can help us reassess our modern “embrace of the traumatic”; that, contrary to popular belief, modern neuroscience does not dismiss Freud’s models of the psyche out of hand; and that celebrated biographer David Michaelis once had a crush on his mother. The 25 writers gathered here never appear to be responding to the same prompt, and their variety of approaches—to Freudian concepts, to psychoanalysis, to Freud the man—is wide-ranging. At a time when Freud is so easily written off as “an anachronism or a punch line,” when “his story is one that many people think they know,” the variety pushes against the myth of that single, already-familiar story by offering unique lines of reasoning and association about a vast array of issues related to him. Other notable contributors include Siri Hustvedt, Colm Tóibín, Sherry Turkle, Rivka Galchen, Adam Gopnik, Rick Moody, and Freud’s great-granddaughter Susie Boyt.
A solid collage of voices to complicate our picture of psychoanalysis.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780691242439
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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