The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Recommend! I won't go into the details now, though.
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. No wonder she won a Nobel in literature!
Read these three books, back-to-back: The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner, Hamlet's Blackberry, by William Powers, and The Last Child in the Woods, by
I found the Powers book somewhat boring, until he talked about dead white philosophers. The Guttenberg bit was really interesting too. It was dull because only the dead white philosopher stuff had new information for me.
This book is about our digital hyper-connectivity and how it harms us (mentally, socially, spiritually). I thought back to the first time i was able to readily turn off an attention-getting device. Nah, it wasn't recently! Nor, was it when i was handed a cell phone, a pager, and a laptop (at the end of the "technology bubble", when I was working for a corporation). Nor was it, really, when i chose to be able to converse w/ people during television commercials (if not during the show) back in the days before there was such a thing as a "mute" button.
My father was on call 24/7. He would get a day off per week. And it was that, literally: He probably had about 24 hours when he wasn't on call. During my growing-up years there were times when the phone rang...
Aside: This was when phones rang, we dialed phones, phones were physically attached to the wall, and there were no answering machines (though there were answering services).
... and we *did not answer it.* What a valuable lesson to have when you are not yet in your teens! You do *not* have to be at someone else's beck and call. You do not have to answer the phone. You do not have to reply instantaneously. It's ok to set limits on your availability.
Powers talks about our hyper-connectivity as though it is a new thing. I don't quite agree. There is a local Branding And Marketing fellow, Justin Foster, who argues that we are going back to a time when we were more connected than we had been for the last ...? I'll guess 100 years. Is the connectivity, the amount you share and with whom, really all that different from living in a small town? Sure, it's happening differently now. At the same time all of the same social rules apply to digital connectivity as applied living in a small town where everyone knows your name (and your parents, and their parents knew each other parents, etc.).
Speaking of small towns: Weiner's book is a chronicle of personal anecdotes of his search to *study* happiness; not to be mistaken as a search for happiness. And having connections to other human beings is a huge part of that. He also comments that most of the happiness involves the outdoors. It is humorous, insightful, and fun when talking about other cultures (i.e. being able to look at U.S. culture through another lens... or look at all!)
Louv's book's chapters are summaries of why we should get outside. There is too much research to list it all in one book -- each chapter could be a volume if one were to do that. Being very pro-environment and pro-planet I was set up to agree with his thesis before I read the summaries.
None of what he says should even be news to most people. (Actually, none of what Weiner or Powers say should be news either.) In Pollan's books he basically says, "eat your fruits and vegetables," -- which should not be news to anyone. Louv says, "get fresh air and exercise [together]." The rest of the book is about the research; and again I choose to stress that THIS IS NOT NEWS. We've known about how important it is to play outside for centuries, if not millenia. And somehow getting outside gets all of us to be both 1) reflective enough to know our selves, 2) connected enough to others and to the planet to be ... happy.
