The Marginalian Favourites

In 1910, the surgeons Moreau and LePrince wrote about their successful operation on an eight-year-old boy who had been blind since birth because of cataracts. When the boy's eyes were healed they removed the bandages and, waving a hand in front of the child's physically perfect eyes, asked him what he saw. "I don't know," was his only reply. What he saw was only a varying brightness in front of him. However, when allowed to touch the hand as it began to move, he cried out in a voice of triumph, "It's moving!" He could feel it move, but he still needed laboriously to learn to see it move. Light and eyes were not enough to grant him sight. How, then, do we see? What's the difference between seeing and perception? What is light?From ancient times to the present, from philosophers to quantum physicists, nothing has so perplexed, so fascinated, so captivated the mind as the elusive definition of light. In Catching the Light, Arthur Zajonc takes us on an epic journey into history, tracing how humans have endeavored to understand the phenomenon of light. Blending mythology, religion, science, literature, and painting, Zajonc reveals in poetic detail the human struggle to identify the vital connection between the outer light of nature and the inner light of the human spirit. He explains the curiousness of the Greeks' blue and green "color blindness": Odysseus gazing longingly at the "wine-dark sea"; the use of chloros (green) as the color of honey in Homer's Odyssey; and Euripides' use of the color green to describe the hue of tears and blood. He demonstrates the complexity of perception through the work of Paul Cézanne—the artist standing on the bank of a river, painting the same scene over and over again, the motifs multiplying before his eyes. And Zajonc goes on to show how our quest for an understanding of light, as well as the conclusions we draw, reveals as much about the nature of our own psyche as it does about the nature of light itself. For the ancient Egyptians the nature of light was clear—it simply was the gaze of God. In the hands of the ancient Greeks, light had become the luminous inner fire whose ethereal effluence brought sight. In our contemporary world of modern quantum physics, science plays the greatest part in our theories of light's origin—from scientific perspectives such as Sir Isaac Newton's "corpuscular theory of light" and Michael Faraday's "lines of force" to such revolutionary ideas as Max Planck's "discrete motion of a pendulum" (the basis of quantum mechanics), Albert Einstein's "particles of light" and "theory of relativity," and Niels Bohr's "quantum jumps." Yet the metaphysical aspects of the scientific search, Zajonc shows, still loom large. For the physicist Richard Feynman, a quantum particle travels all paths, eventually distilling to one path whose action is least—the most beautiful path of all. Whatever light is, here is where we will find it.With rare clarity and unmatched lyricism, Zajonc illuminates the profound implications of the relationships between the multifaceted strands of human experience and scientific endeavor.A fascinating search into our deepest scientific mystery, Catching the Light is a brilliant synthesis.

A sweeping, heartfelt saga about the course of one man's life, beginning and ending in post-war Ireland.Cyril Avery is not a real Avery — or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he?Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamorous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from, and over his many years will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more.We are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man.The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.EndorsementsBy the New York Times bestselling author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that both he and others in Auschwitz coped (or didn't) with the experience. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest — and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The sort of person the concentration camp prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not of camp influences alone. Frankl came to believe man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. This outstanding work offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the art of living.Endorsements'A book to read, to cherish, to debate, and one that will ultimately keep the memories of the victims alive' — John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Diane Ackerman tackles the realm of creativity by exploring one of the most essential aspects of our ability to play.Deep Play is that more intensified form of play that puts us in a rapturous mood and awakens the most creative, sentient, and joyful aspects of our inner selves.As Diane Ackerman ranges over a panoply of artistic, spiritual, and athletic activities, from spiritual rapture through extreme sports, we gain a greater sense of what it means to be "in the moment" and totally, transcendentally human.Keenly perceived and written with poetic exuberance, Deep Play enlightens us by revealing the manifold ways we can enhance our lives.

In Consolations, David Whyte unpacks aspects of being human that many of us spend our lives trying vainly to avoid — loss, heartbreak, vulnerability, fear — boldly reinterpreting them, fully embracing their complexity and never shying away from paradox in his relentless search for meaning.Beginning with 'Alone' and closing with 'Withdrawal', each piece in this life-affirming book is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden our perspectives on life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability, the experience of feeling overwhelmed and the desire to run away from it all.Consolations invites readers into a poetic and thoughtful consideration of words whose meaning and interpretation influence the paths we choose and the way we traverse them throughout our lives.

Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged — these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love.The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire.This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.

Under the Sea-Wind marks the beginnings of one of the most significant careers in nature writing. In it Rachel Carson celebrates the mystery and beauty of birds and sea creatures in their natural habitat, conjuring the atmosphere of the shore and the open sea and the delicately balanced, fragile struggle for life along the shoreline.

'The story of the negro in America is the story of America ... it is not a very pretty story'James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. These essays range over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father, and his experiences of Paris; they capture the complexity of Black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom.Endorsements'A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew' — Washington Post'Edgy and provocative, entertainingly satirical' — Robert McCrum, Guardian'Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest' — Time

Where is the center of the sea? Why do the waves never break there? A book containing unanswerable, fantastical questions, inviting us to be curious, while simultaneously embracing what we cannot know.Holding the wonder and mystery of childhood and the experience and knowing that come with growing up, these questions are by turns lyrical, strange, surreal, spiritual, historical and political. They foreground the natural world, and their curiosity transcends all logic; and because they are paradoxes and riddles that embrace the limits of our ability to know, they engage with human freedom in the deepest way, removing the burden and constraint that somehow, we are meant to have answers to every question.Gorgeously, cosmically illustrated by Paloma Valdivia, here Neruda's questions, already visual in themselves, gain a double visuality that makes them even more palpable and resonant. So clearly rooted in Chilean landscapes as they are, the questions are revealed as a communion with nature and its mysteries.EndorsementsNew York Times Best Children's Book of 2022Marginalian (fka Brain Pickings) Favorite Book of 2022New York Times bestsellerUSBBY Outstanding International Book of 20232023 BolognaRagazzi Award Amazing Bookshelf SelectionSelected for the Academy of American Poets 2022 Featured Fall Books List for Young ReadersStarred reviews in The Horn Book, Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly

Issues of trust come attached to almost every human interaction, yet few people realize how powerfully their ability to determine trustworthiness predicts future success. David DeSteno’s cutting-edge research on reading trust cues with humanoid robots has already excited widespread media interest. In The Truth About Trust, the renowned psychologist shares his findings and debunks numerous popular beliefs, including Paul Zak’s theory that oxytocin is the “moral molecule.” From education and business to romance and dieting, DeSteno’s fascinating, paradigm-shifting book offers new insights and practical takeaways that will forever change how readers understand, communicate, and make decisions in every area of life.Endorsements“This one’s worth reading. Trust me.” — Daniel Gilbert, PhD

Some of the best philosophers in the world gather in surprising places—preschools and playgrounds. They debate questions about metaphysics and morality, even though they’ve never heard those words and can’t tie their shoes. They’re kids. And as University of Michigan professor of philosophy and law Scott Hershovitz shows, they can help grown-ups solve some of life’s greatest mysteries.Hershovitz has two young sons, Rex and Hank. From the time they could talk, he noticed that they raised philosophical questions and tried to answer them. They re-created ancient arguments and advanced entirely new ones. That’s not unusual, Hershovitz says. Every kid is a philosopher.Powered by questions — Does Hank have the right to drink soda? Is it ever okay to swear? Does the number six exist? The Hershovitzes take us on a fun romp through classic and contemporary philosophy. If we join kids on philosophical adventures, Hershovitz argues, we can become sharper thinkers and recapture their wonder at the world.A fast-paced and funny investigation of life’s biggest questions, guided by the world’s most clever and creative thinkers—kids.Endorsements“This is the only parenting book I would insist everyone read, whether they have kids or not.” — Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers and contributing writer at The New Yorker

The author of Crossing the Unknown Sea and The Heart Aroused encourages readers to reimagine how they inhabit the worlds of love, work, and self-understanding. Whyte suggests that separating these "marriages" in order to balance them is to destroy the fabric of happiness itself. Drawing from his own struggles and the lives of some of the world's great writers and artists — from Dante to Jane Austen to Robert Louis Stevenson — Whyte explores the ways these core commitments are connected. He says only by understanding the journey involved in each of the three marriages and the stages of their maturation can we understand how to bring them together in one fulfilled life.Endorsements"crystalline" — Elle

A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a testament to people who are left out of the archives.In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced the imminent sale of her daughter, Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery and the uncertain freedom afterward in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.EndorsementsNational Book Award winner. New York Times bestseller.“Deeply layered and insightful.” — The Washington Post“A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness.” — Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United StatesFrederick Douglass Book Prize; Harriet Tubman Prize; PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize; Lawrence W. Levine Award; Darlene Clark Hine Award; Cundill History Prize; Joan Kelley Memorial Prize; Massachusetts Book Award; MAAH Stone Book Award; Kirkus Prize; Mark Lynton History Prize; Chautauqua Prize.One of the ten best books of The Washington Post, Slate, Vulture, and Publishers Weekly.One of the best books of The New York Times, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, Book Riot, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist.

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension — the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved.In An Immense World, author and acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.A grand tour through the hidden realms of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world.EndorsementsFrom Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times–bestselling author Ed Yong