by Marsha M. Linehan

This is not a self-help book but a memoir. Marsha Linehan was the developer of a therapy for suicidal patients called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, and was herself a mental patient, institutionalized from ages 18-20 after a sudden breakdown.

She is not a writer. Episodes repeat themselves or hit sudden dead ends. Sadly, electroshock treatment while in the institution wiped out all or nearly all of her memory of her life up to that point, and she relies on others for insights into her childhood. It is hard to make a coherent picture of her in her youth… a popular vivacious “motor-mouthed” girl, but worn down at home by a berating, fault-finding mother.

Through it all she has maintained a strong faith; a devout Catholic through most of her life, now a Zen Master. She has had mystical experiences and seems a very neurologically interesting person.

The snapshots of her life as a pious young girl resonated particularly with me “At one point I decided to sleep without a pillow, as a sacrifice to God.” This was so something I would have done. My own sacrifices veered more towards the giving up of foods. It was always Lent for me. I was skipping desserts every other day, then two out of three days… next thing you know I’m a teenager with an eating disorder. But I digress. She also quits a sorority as a sacrifice, and she feels strangely like she should not write about this particular episode, because at the time she promised God she would never tell anyone this real reason why she quit the sorority. She takes her vows seriously. Indeed, while she recognizes that life in a convent was not her calling, she takes vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as a kind of “lay nun.”

DBT, the behavioral therapy she developed, is described in detail. But this is not a self-help book. This is a therapy for the most difficult of cases, people who have engaged in self-harm and are a real threat to themselves.

Her life trajectory – personal, professional, and spiritual – was interesting to follow; I like reading almost any life story, and the writing doesn’t have to be great. Here is someone who went through the “hell” of mental illness, and in her words, got herself out determined to help others get out of hell too. She seems to have achieved success and I was happy to see her end in a good place.

This was extremely humanizing. The stories are so varied. We need to find some kind of solution to this whole situation.

by Sofi Thanhauser

I want to give 5 stars to the chapter on wool and 3.5 to everything else. The chapter on linen I liked, because I just like hanging out with textiles and talk about old clothes; but as the first chapter, it falsely led me to believe this was going to be one of those non-fiction books that is just one well-researched fact after another. Instead, the next chapter, on cotton, was all about how terrible cotton is and has always been. That’s not my type of book either, but for a different reason. I don’t like just reading about how everything is awful, over and over. The chapter on silk was OK; but then, for synthetics, we get intensive details of various worker strikes earlier last century. I wanted to read a book about textiles, not the history of labor unions.

But then finally, WOOL! It’s interesting Thanhauser ordered her chapters the way she did; one would have expected the ‘primitive’ materials to come first and synthetics last; but I think she put wool last because it was the most positive chapter, where small mills and handcrafters save the day after all that nasty environmental damage and class warfare.

Thanhauser by the Wool chapter has proven herself a super-intelligent, serious researcher; so it was fun to see her discover my tribe of fiber-festival-goers and handspinners. She visits Fingerlakes Woolen Mill in New York, which could stand in for my own friends at Green Mountain Spinnery in Vermont or any of hundreds of small-scale mills we all know and love. She visits with people rescuing equipment from the now-defunct American Textile History Museum of Lowell, Mass. And she goes to “Woolfest” in Cockermouth, England. I was seriously planning to go to Woolfest in 2012, before familial hard times hit. It does indeed sound akin to the High Holydays experienced on this side of the pond at the New York Sheep & Wool Festival in Rhinebeck or (shout-out) the Vermont counterpart at Tunbridge. Alas, “I had to admit it [as do I]: Woolfest was a gathering of old women.” So many gray heads I counted while vending at Tunbridge. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Fun fact: the University of Wyoming created a Wool Department in 1907 and for a time was the only university to offer a PhD in wool. Imagine being a Doctor of Wool – I love it!

by Michael Pollan

Amazing.

I’m not sure how to begin. Michael Pollan is about my age and a materialist – an atheist, with the perspective that the physical laws of matter should be able to explain everything there is. And yet. Those who go on psychedelic journeys so often have mystical experiences – “the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed,” like they “have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken.” William James wrote, “Dreams cannot stand this test.”

Pollan writes, “The most straightforward …is that it’s simply true: the altered state of consciousness has opened the person up to a truth that the rest of us… simply cannot see.”

Pollan then gives us a pretty long history of the research on psychedelics done in this country in the last century; and details about his experiences, which do qualify as “mystical” (a survey told him so). He trips on three different psychedelic substances: mushrooms, LSD, and “the toad,” literally toad venom. This last is the most amazing and the most difficult for him to put into words. What can definitely be said is that the effects of smoking the distilled venom of this toad kick in before the smoker even has a chance to exhale – you inhale one puff and you are transported to before the Big Bang, before there was any being at all. Pollan remarks on how often people express gratitude for “being alive” – after smoking the toad, he was on his knees with gratitude for there being “being” at all.

This actually was an interesting complement to my recent reading of LOST IN MATH by Sabine Hossenfelder. That was about the fundamental question of why we should ever expect the laws of physics to be “beautiful”, why we are bothered that quantum mechanics doesn’t seem intuitive – why should it be? There would have been no reason for our species to evolve to have a fundamental understanding of quantum mechanics or to have brains that “like” the laws of physics. Why the hubris that we should be able to know and understand everything? Maybe there are things we can’t know.

Not without physical tweaks, that is – in the form of certain pharmaceuticals, mushrooms, or toads – that change our perceptions enough for us to see something beyond what we can usually see.

Maybe there is something “beyond” after all.

The book also has a great section on how psychedelics are slowly finding their way back into medical research, and are showing promise to treat an array of disorders: addiction, depression, end-of-life anxiety. The story of the end days of the cancer patient who turned his mind around with psychedelics almost brought me to tears. The description of how psychedelics can alleviate addictions was enlightening – OK, existential dread being lifted by a mystical experience, that makes a certain kind of sense; but how and why should tripping help you quit smoking? I loved one woman’s explanation: “It put smoking in a whole new context. Smoking seemed very unimportant; it seemed kind of stupid, to be honest.”

We’ve seen such sea changes in the legalization of marijuana, in the acceptance of gay marriage – maybe we’ll live to see psychedelics taken off the list of controlled substances; maybe shrooms will start “popping up” someday in a store near you. This book made me really want to do drugs. Maybe not the toad. But some of the others, for sure.

by Lynda Gratton & Andrew Scott

Extremely repetitive. Summary: We are more and more likely each of us to live to age 100, so you’d better start saving more money; and abandon the “three phase life” thinking of school + work + career in favor of at least five phases, with more transitions. I just saved you 373 pages.

by Jia Tolentino

Collection of essays. She’s better when not talking about herself.

She’s in her 30s, Filipina, grew up in Houston in an evangelical church, and as a teenager was a cheerleader and appeared in a reality TV show. I can’t relate remotely to this person.

by Margaret Hathaway

A couple decides to embark on a year of hands-on, cross-country goat research. Yes, it’s a classic “My Year Of” book – it’s been a while, hasn’t it!

Margaret and Karl decide they want to produce goat cheese. Or something. They know they like cheese and they think they like goats. So let’s do some research – and maybe get a book deal out of it. They visit a lot of farms and auctions; discover, to some relief, that yes! they like goats. And decide, definitely dairy. Not meat.

So there’s my main beef (ha ha). Despite the fact that there is a cashmere goat on the cover; “Angora goats rounded up for shearing” in the photo section plus a photo of someone’s angora goat mailbox… fiber goats practically don’t exist in this book. It’s dairy or meat with no Choice C.

My second complaint is the 30,000-foot view of everything that we get. Example: a buckling sold at auction for $16,000. The buckling is shown in the photos; and the sale is mentioned in the text. What breed of goat is he? Who knows? I guess the authors knew – this is all allegedly part of a research project with dutiful note taking. But the detail somehow missed getting into the book. Who is this book for?

I bought it and read it because I just wanted to be around goats. But I can’t give it more than two stars.

by Sabine Hossenfelder

I can’t say I understood any of the physics in this. Yet I read the whole thing. (Save the appendices.) Because she keeps it so funny, and because the premise is simple: we should harbor no expectation that nature should be beautiful; and science should be about finding the truth, not coming up with beautiful theories. “We don’t seek theories to evoke emotional reactions; we seek explanations for what we observe.” Yet physicists keep working on theories where the math is ‘beautiful’, regardless whether these theories bear any relation to reality or can even hoped to be proven or disproven.

Hossenfelder is a physicist based in Germany. She literally travels the world to write this book, interviewing physicists, often wearing out her welcome, to ask each of them about their work; why do they think this is beautiful and the other unsatisfying, and above all, why do they think we should care what’s beautiful. She’s harsh in her criticism of getting “lost in math” to the detriment of what should be the main business of explaining the world. Or in her words:

“Maybe I’m just here to find an excuse for leaving academia because I’m disillusioned, unable to stay motivated through all the null results. & what an amazing excuse i have come up with – blaming a scientific community for misusing the scientific method.”

Some passages that made things simple enough for even me to understand:

“If you have a map of a mountainous landscape that doesn’t show altitudes, winding roads won’t make much sense. But if you know there are mountains, you understand why the roads curve like that – it’s the best they an do. That we cannot see the curvature of space-time is like having a map without altitude lines. If you could see space-time curvature, you would understand it makes perfect sense for planets to orbit around the Sun. It’s the best they can do.”

“It makes sense, intuitively, that our intuition fails in the quantum world. We don’t experience quantum effects in daily life… Indeed, it would be surprising if quantum physics were intuitive, because we never had a chance to get accustomed to it. Being unintuitive therefore shouldn’t be held against a theory. But like lack of aesthetic appeal, it is a hurdle to progress. & maybe, I think, this isn’t a hurdle we can overcome. Maybe we’re stuck in the foundations of physics because we’ve reached the limit of what humans can comprehend.”

by Ken Kesey

This was a hard read because it’s narrated from the point of view of one of the mental patients; namely, the Chief, the most memorable character in the movie – I came into this having seen the movie, once, about 15 years ago. I was psyched that it was told from “Chief” Bromden’s perspective at first, but it’s a little hard to go with him down so many of his schizoid journeys.

It was fun to read how Nurse Ratched and MacMurphy were originally written; and the most memorable, climactic scenes were very true to the book.

PS Extremely sexist and racist.

by Ellyn Gaydos

This book is about the hard work of being a farmhand, spending a day with back bent doing serious vegetable farming, and killing animals. Killing a lot of animals.

Very poetic. Was sometimes hard for me to read for an hour at a time, because of its lack of narrative arc. But beautiful in places.

“I love him too, but I am promised to farming. I choose it over him every time. It is not like choosing between two people. How could you trade the sky, the water, or the mountains for a single heart? Instead I imagine the earth opening to take me into its fold.”

“In the heart of summer, [we] are dwarfed by the farm, the sheer life force of it, pulled by the demands of plants and animals, pressed like blunt objects into the ground, buried in the work we have wrought.”

“[T]here is always enough food to eat. This is the compensation for the crude work of training life into channels of fecundity.”