Satisfaction
By Gregory Berns (Henry Holt)
We all seek satisfaction. But is its essence in pleasure -- the man on the beach with a cold beer in hand? No, says neuroscientist Berns. The greatest reward is the fruit of one's own labor. It helps, too, when the challenge is wildly unpredictable. Berns takes us on a road trip of satisfaction: He visits the pleasure and pain of a suburban S&M club, examines why we lose the taste for sushi when we eat it all the time, ponders why a person would run 100 miles and befriends crossword puzzlers who find that "Aha!" experience when everything just clicks.
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
By Ariel Levy (Free Press)
Journalist Levy introduces us to the female chauvinist pig, the girl who has tossed aside the egalitarian goals of feminism to become raunchier and shallower than any Hefner-esque lothario. Mining pop culture to build her case, Levy corners female producers from the Girls Gone Wild franchise, discovers a new breed of lesbian that engages in sport sex and dissects the shtupping-and-shopping ethos of Sex and the City. The book is culturally astute and not at all preachy. Her section on smut culture among the baby boomlet testifies that the phenomenon is only on the rise.
Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
By Joshua Wolf Shenk (Houghton Mifflin)
Each generation reinvents history in its own image, especially when reimagining the lives of luminaries. Independent scholar Shenk uses this self-reflexive tool as one more means of probing Lincoln's epic struggle with depression. Shenk carefully weighs the documented facts of Lincoln's life alongside our emerging understanding of mood disorders. In so doing he illuminates enough that is unknown or misunderstood about Lincoln to deliver the seemingly impossible: still more reasons to venerate the great statesman.
Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins
By Nancy Segal (Harvard University Press)
At what age does a gay man, who is also a triplet, first realize that he differs from his brothers? How does a woman cope with her twin sister's death in the World Trade Center, or with a twin's decision to undergo a sex change, or a twin's infertility? Renowned twin researcher Nancy Segal's lucid portraits of identical twins, triplets and quadruplets are an engaging reminder that multiples teach us more than how to think about genetic and environmental influences: Their stories illustrate the human capacity for altruism, familial devotion and self-love.
Hunger: An Unnatural History
By Sharman Apt Russell (Basic Books)
An intellectual history of a biological urge. Russell probes the 19th-century fascination with fasting artists, introduces us to an obese man who lost weight by eating nothing at all for a year and tells the tale of underground Jewish doctors studying famine in the Warsaw Ghetto. Unnatural History explains why the average hunger striker can last about 40 days without food, tells us how best to refeed a person on the edge of starvation and tries to explain why nearly a billion people worldwide don't get enough to eat. A hugely original and fascinating book.
False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear
By Marc Siegel, M.D. (Wiley)
Anthrax, vaccine shortages, and SARS, oh my! Since 9/11, Americans have been pummeled with an endless series of apparent threats. Statistics easily prove that these dangers are overhyped by politicians and the media, creating what Siegel dubs a "culture of worry." Constant fear, however, rewires the brain's circuitry and can have a debilitating affect on health. Siegel, an associate professor at the New York University School of Medicine, makes a passionate argument that the only thing we have to fear is, indeed, our own paranoia. Reason, he says, is the best vaccination for this epidemic.
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