Service Alert
Delay in delivery of ZIP and Direct to Player materials
You may experience a delay in delivery of Direct to Player materials. All requests for materials will be delivered as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
You may experience a delay in delivery of Direct to Player materials. All requests for materials will be delivered as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
Showing 1 - 6 of 6 items
By Fintan O'Toole. 2022
In We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how…
Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society-perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisisBy Rachel Aviv. 2022
The highly anticipated debut from the acclaimed award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv compels us to examine how the stories…
we tell about mental illness shape our sense of who we are.Mental illnesses are often seen as chronic and intractable forces that take over our lives, that define us. But how much do the stories we tell about our illnesses—and the process of diagnosis—inform their course? In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv writes about how explanations for mental distress may shape our health, our sense of who we are, and the possibilities for who we can be in the world. Drawing on deep, original reporting and unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lived in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after a period of psychosis; a man seeking revenge against a prominent psychoanalytic hospital through a lawsuit that dramatizes the clash between two irreconcilable models of the mind; an affluent young woman whose lifelong psychiatric treatment eventually leads her to go off her meds in a desperate attempt to figure out who she would be without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of being institutionalized at the age of six and meeting Hava, a friend and fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does.While the stories unfold in different eras and cultures, they converge in the psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience. Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations and endeavor to recover a sense of agency, in search of new ways to understand a self in the world. Challenging conventional ideas of mental disease as something static, Aviv's accounts are testaments to the porousness and resilience of the mind.By Fintan O'Toole. 2021
A celebrated Irish writer’s magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world.…
Fintan O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary “backwater” to an almost totally open society—perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O’Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland’s main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin’s streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O’Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O’Toole’s telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy’s 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis. A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O’Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of “deliberate unknowing,” which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don’t Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us. New York Times BestsellerBy Rachel Aviv. 2022
The highly anticipated debut from the acclaimed award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv compels us to examine how the stories…
we tell about mental illness shape our sense of who we are.Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman celebrated as a saint who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children's forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn't know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv's gripping exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does.Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives—and our identities, too. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.By Linda Villarosa. 2022
From an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark…
book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation. In 2018, Linda Villarosa's New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa's article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore. Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to &“live sicker and die quicker&” compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.By Hua Hsu. 2022
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the…
solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu&“This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.&” —Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars RoomIn the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes &’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn&’t seem to have a place for either of them.But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he&’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.