EXCEPTIONAL GIFT BOOKS

Cold Moon On Life, Love, and Responsibility

Roger Rosenblatt, Turtle Point Press (OCT 27) Hardcover $15.95 (104pp), 978-1-885983-88-6 PHILOSOPHY

Every author launches their book into the world with a prayer. Please, powers that be, let this humble collection of words make teenaged girls laugh uncontrollably, or provoke men to schedule a prostate exam, as the case may be. Some authors ask little, others ask much, and very occasionally, an author seeks to change the world.

In Cold Moon, eighty-year-old Roger Rosenblatt devotes his transcendent storytelling and prose skills to the “three important lessons I have learned over the many years: an appreciation of being alive, the gift and power of love, and the necessity of exercising responsibility toward one another.” What follows is a dreamlike collage of memories—tearfilled, joyful, ponderous, and unfailingly hopeful. He writes of movie scenes from childhood, experiences with the Lost Boys of Sudan, Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, selkies, Poseidonians, and, repeatedly, his love for the ocean: “One thing you can say about the sea. It resists resolution. … It does not wish to take a position. To the contrary, it clearly, actively wishes to take no position or to take every position at once, which makes the sea like poetry. Like art in general. … Everything resolved by nothing resolved.”

Rosenblatt’s prayer is that present circumstances not influence our thinking about the things that matter most. But he is no mollycoddler. “Remember what Brecht said when asked what to sing about in dark times. He said sing about the dark times. Loud, lusty singing.”

Set yourself singing.

Uncorked A Corkscrew Collection

Marilynn Gelfman Karp, Jeremy Franklin Brooke Abbeville Press (NOV 10) Hardcover $24.95 (224pp) 978-0-7892-1377-8. PHOTOGRAPHY

At some exasperating point, every wine drinker faces a wine bottle in need of opening with no corkscrew at hand. It’s a pivotal moment because only when forced to use a screwdriver, fork, or one’s teeth to carry out an inventive extraction (or shove, at other times) are we forced to confront the fact that the humble corkscrew is indispensable to the good life.

Corkscrews have been with us since wine bottles were standardized in the eighteenth century, most likely adapted from the gun worms or screws used to remove wadding from the gun barrels of the day. And it is the all-too-human desire for our most common and useful devices to also be beautiful that helps to explain what’s become of the corkscrew over the centuries.

Uncorked: A Corkscrew Collection, Marilynn Karp’s stunningly photographed collection of more than 650 corkscrews, is a museum-like tour from clunky, cast steel bar top contraptions to ornate silver and ivory screw pulls to a fourpart novelty corkscrew depicting the corpse of Prohibition to an obscene facing couple corkscrew featuring a soldier and a woman lifting her skirt.

Each of the ten chapters showcases corkscrews using a similar mechanical process to pry corks from bottles. Karp writes, “the arrangement of the whole collection and this volume is about identifying discrete and fluid categories of form and function within the evolutionary narrative of the corkscrew, which is succumbing to the advent of the screw-top.”

Uncorked is an irresistible page turner for any lover of the grape.

The Story of Evolution in 25 Discoveries The Evidence and the People Who Found It

Donald R. Prothero, Columbia University Press (DEC 22) Hardcover $35 (384pp), 978-0-231-19036-7 SCIENCE

Much of science and the study of nature in the years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 came down to an effort to understand the mind of God. Through that lens, wildflowers and birdsong were viewed as evidence of God’s love for humankind—why else would they exist, except to make our lives on Earth that much more enjoyable? But Darwin and other critical thinkers chipped away at biblical mainstays like Noah’s animal-filled ark and minds began to change, albeit slowly. Even today, evolution has its doubters who shout for missing links and question the concrete evidence showing that birds and reptiles are closely related.

A large part of the problem for skeptics is how difficult it is to comprehend time in increments of millions and billions of years, something that geologists and evolutionary scientists do routinely. But a keen understanding of time is of the essence in order to get from the Earthforming 4.5 billion years ago to the first inklings of life to a young Englishman voyaging around the world on the HMS Beagle gathering evidence for his revolutionary ideas: “There is grandeur in this view of life … from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

With The Story of Evolution in 25 Discoveries, Donald Prothero provides a masterful, lively primer on the abundant evidence for evolution, including the latest fossil findings at digging sites and laboratories around the world—all furthering to close this case, once and for all. Artwork from Uncorked: A Corkscrew Collection, by Marilynn Gelfman Karp and Jeremy Franklin Brooke. Used with permission from Abbeville Press.

Embodied Healing Survivor and Facilitator Voices from the Practice of Trauma-sensitive Yoga

Jenn Turner (Editor), North Atlantic Books (NOV 10) Softcover $22.95 (368pp), 978-1-62317-534-4 SELF-HELP

Chiropractors and massage therapists stay in demand because they know how stress is held in the backs, necks, and shoulders of their patients. Fortunately, with some manipulation, those aches and knots can usually be relieved. But chronic stress is much more problematic, and is now known to compromise immune systems and increase the likelihood of more serious illnesses like cancer and heart disease. Obviously, what happens in the mind definitely doesn’t stay in the mind. And then there’s the trauma of sexual violence, warfare, forced migration, and severe domestic abuse—different beasts altogether.

In Embodied Healing, Jenn Turner showcases the extraordinary success being found by therapists using body-based treatments to help trauma patients heal. Through twelve essays on Trauma Center Trauma-sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) written by a diverse group of trauma survivors, yoga instructors, and therapists, the book offers concrete evidence that trauma exists in both the mind and the body, but that effective treatment may best be approached through the body.

Recovering from severe childhood abuse, Nicole Brown Faulknor writes of how she lost the ability to live externally because she internalized the tormented parts of herself. Using TCTSY, “I have quietly begun to learn to move through the traumatized parts of myself … first by learning that I had a body and this body had feelings, and that I could feel my body as well as claim my body. My body belonged to me.”

Using yoga and the power of movement as a much-needed counterpoint to talk-therapy in the treatment of trauma, TCTSY is beautifully captured in this engaging project.

IRL Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives

Chris Stedman, Broadleaf Books (OCT 20) Hardcover $24.99 (336pp), 978-1-5064-6351-3, SELF-HELP

In the days before the 2020 presidential election, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that “Facebook and Twitter have become giant engines for destroying the two pillars of our democracy—truth and trust.” These social networks, he says, “are destroying our nation’s cognitive immunity—its ability to sort truth from falsehood.”

Chilling words, but not surprising to anyone paying close attention to how the online world has infiltrated the daily lives of billions of people in such a short amount of time. But what exactly is happening in the minds of so many social media users to make preposterous lies and conspiracies appear reasonable? And why is the once noble search for truth suddenly so trivial?

In IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives, Chris Stedman seeks to answer “what it means to be digital and to reframe our frustrating, fascinating, and fraught digital lives as a new opportunity to ask persistently difficult questions about what it means to be human.” The gay author of Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious, and the founding executive director of the Yale Humanist Community, Stedman is at ease in the existential, both digitally and IRL (in real life). “If being an atheist studying religion taught me anything, it was to question. If growing up queer taught me anything, it was to question,” he writes, but refreshingly, he refuses to blame the internet for undermining his search for authenticity. “If anything, my social media use has helped me recognize this split between public and private self, and the fears and inclinations that underscore and bolster it, by making it more obvious to me.”

IRL is a fascinating contribution to this all-important conversation.