The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Mate and Daniel Mate // 576 pgs

⭐⭐⭐⭐

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?

Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Co-written with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

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I listened to this via audiobook and enjoyed it a lot! I loved the introspective nature of it. There's a lot to this and while it was a joy to listen to, I wish I had a physical copy. It's one of the very few books that I think I'd enjoy annotating, and regret not taking any notes to refer back to later. I don't think it's necessarily groundbreaking, but the way Mate weaved his thoughts together was highly engaging.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

320 pages

★★★★★

The psychology and sociology behind past and current cults are revealed in the power of language by Amanda Montell in this collection of nonfiction essays. The way Montell addresses the fact that many things found “normal” in modern day society use language to control people and can be considered a cult by this standard was extremely interesting. Things such as SoulCycle, MLMs, social media influencers, QAnon, etc. all use language to manipulate the everyday person into following them blindly and wholeheartedly with nothing but the power of words, just as Jonestown, the Manson family, and Scientology have. 

This was eye opening and gripping from start to finish, not using words or ideas that are too technical for the average reader, who are the ones who need to learn this information the most.

Palaces for the People, How Social Infrastructure Can Help fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg, 277 pages

If you think about it, in the last 30 years, social media has replaced almost all human contact.  So, where are the people to meet, gather, and socialize?  Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology, addresses such issues.  Where can people come together?  One such place the book focuses on is the public library.  The library is a great place for all people to gather.  He also says the future of democratic societies rests on shared spaces, such as churches, schools, daycare centers, libraries, bookstores, and parks.  This is social infrastructure.  When it is strong communities flourish, when neglected communities decline.  He sites the great heat wave in Chicago in 1995.  Communities who were tight knit saw less deaths than those that were not.  Not only focusing on libraries as palaces for the people, where people can gather safely, one also must look beyond to where the future is for safe gathering spots for all people.

A Colony In A Nation by Chris Hayes

A Colony In A Nation by Chris Hayes - 256 pages

America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure--wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation--reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first -law and order- president. With the clarity and originality that distinguished his prescient bestseller, Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes upends our national conversation on policing and democracy in a book of wide-ranging historical, social, and political analysis.

Hayes contends our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order, fear trumps civil rights, and aggressive policing resembles occupation. A Colony in a Nation explains how a country founded on justice now looks like something uncomfortably close to a police state. How and why did Americans build a system where conditions in Ferguson and West Baltimore mirror those that sparked the American Revolution?

A Colony in a Nation examines the surge in crime that began in the 1960s and peaked in the 1990s, and the unprecedented decline that followed. Drawing on close-hand reporting at flashpoints of racial conflict, as well as deeply personal experiences with policing, Hayes explores cultural touchstones, from the influential -broken windows- theory to the -squeegee men- of late-1980s Manhattan, to show how fear causes us to make dangerous and unfortunate choices, both in our society and at the personal level. With great empathy, he seeks to understand the challenges of policing communities haunted by the omnipresent threat of guns. Most important, he shows that a more democratic and sympathetic justice system already exists--in a place we least suspect.

A Colony in a Nation is an essential book--searing and insightful--that will reframe our thinking about law and order in the years to come.

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? - Jared Diamond 2012 481 pages

It may be hard to believe, but the modern experts who tell us how to live life, may not be totally correct.

The aborigines from New Guinea let toddlers play with any sharp object they can pick up. They let the little ones play in and near the fire. These are all things that would get you or I hot-lined and possibly jailed. Yet the New Gueineans live lives that are just as satisfying as ours.

In many parts of the third world, children make their own toys. How sad. Our children get the newest and most high-tech we can afford. Yet the children in the third world exercise creativity and resourcefulness that our children do not learn with high-tech toys. Third world children play in groups and build life-long social skills, our children...

Hmmmmmm, wait a minute....