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All Things Connect

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by Amy Wu Spanning twenty years of curiosity, connection, and care, All Things Connect chronicles Andrew and Ise’s shared life in an increasingly complicated world. Divided into two main acts, The Rite of Spring begins with their chance encounter at a dog park in 2005, through their life of environmental activism on scales both large and small. The Dance of Death follows, offering an exploration of intimate themes of personal loss and grief. All Things Connect is a story told predominantly through Andrew and Ise’s conversations, punctuated by familiar headlines: the 2008 recession, natural disasters, Brexit, the pandemic, etc. There… Read More

SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide

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by Soph Myers-Kelley SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide is a force written by Cannupa Hanska Luger, a multidisciplinary artist who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation. He creates artistic poetry by altering the original texts of a field/survival guide from the 1970’s. Eden Pearlstein contributes through “redactive and lifted poetries,” with many pages of the original text mostly being blacked out. In a world where the rich have largely abandoned earth via space travel, the remaining poor and largely BIPOC inhabitants must make a pathway for survival. Surviva provides text with new and old Indigenous lessons intermingled, while… Read More

Guns in the United States – Stories of Trauma

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by Kevin Wolf Content Advisory: this review contains school shootings, mass shootings, gun violence, suicide statistics, and suicide attempts (latter occurring in one or more books reviewed here). The crisis Lifeline number in the U.S. and Canada is 988, in the U.K. it’s 999; and for elsewhere go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines.   According to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2020 – 2022 (most recent year available when report published), “Firearms Remain Leading Cause of Death for Children and Teens, and Disproportionately Affect People of Color.” The books reviewed here are about non-war-caused, gun-related trauma and deaths in… Read More

The EC Archives: Psychoanalysis

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by Matt Peters   The EC Archives: Psychoanalysis collects all four issues of the short-lived EC Comics series Psychoanalysis, which premiered and disappeared in a single year, 1955. The comic’s title referred to an approach to psychotherapy that Sigmund Freud developed in Austria in the late 1800s. In developing psychoanalysis, Freud held that early life experiences—particularly those involving trauma or unmet emotional needs—shape the unconscious mind in ways that affect a person’s moods and behaviors later in life. He believed that individuals often repress painful or socially unacceptable emotions, which then resurface as anxiety, depression, compulsive behaviors, or other disorders…. Read More

The Naked Tree

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by Matt Peters   The trauma of violence can linger decades later, waiting for the slightest reminder to bring it back to the surface. A resemblance of something from the past can steal the survivor from the present, forcing them to relive a separation, a loss, or an atrocity. Clinical terms like post-traumatic stress disorder can’t fully describe how the experience permeates a survivor’s life, turning the past into something inescapable. It can haunt not only survivors but also their posterity, as behavioral cues and epigenetic markers—chemical changes to DNA—are passed on to the next generation, causing the initial shock… Read More

Two Heads: A Graphic Exploration of How Our Brains Work with Other Brains

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by Christine Castigliano, HeartsQuest.com   This engaging family project answers some of life’s most probing questions, such as: Why can’t you tickle yourself? How do we come to trust others? Are two heads really better than one? Uta & Chris Frith, a renowned wife-and-husband team of cognitive neuroscientists, pioneered major studies of brain disorders over their fifty-year careers. Created with their son, author Alex Frith and artist Daniel Locke, Two Heads: A Graphic Exploration of How Our Brains Work with Other Brains, models one of their proudest discoveries: the power of collaboration among people who think differently. The illustrations demystify… Read More