Book Reviews

Oncologist Azra Raza’s The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last presents an innovative perspective on the ongoing war on cancer. Drawing from both personal narrative and cutting-edge research, Dr. Raza underlines the importance of early detection and lends an empowering voice to the suffering of cancer patients.

We have all experienced stress; in some form it is a survival tool that gives us energy and fuel to handle a pressing situation. Sometimes a stressful situation is so overwhelming that we will do anything to avoid that situation for the rest of our life. In these cases, our security system will code everything in that situation into a script that will trigger a stress response as soon as anything reminds us of it. That stress response will grow stronger as our system generalizes it, to the point where we can generate a full life-or-death panic response by simply thinking about it. It is then called post-traumatic stress.

Gill Westland’s 2015 release entitled, Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in Psychotherapy, merits mention. Her voice felt personable, reachable, while professional, informative. There’s something for anyone involved in mental health care as Gill draws on current findings from: infant development studies; neuroscience; various schools and approaches; and mindfulness/Buddhist practices.

William Ferraiolo’s newest book is written in the style of philosophical approach based on the Stoics. While the word ‘stoic’ means to endure pain and suffering without complaining or showing your feelings, a Stoic, with a capital S, dates back to 300 B.C. when someone named Zeno founded Stoicism, a systematic philosophy that taught people that they should be free from passion, unmoved by joy or grief, and that they should submit to unavoidable situations in life without complaint.

This morning I felt a connective epiphany, a strong resonance, while reading Raja Selvam’s new book, The Practice of Embodying Emotions, chapter 9 specifically, I felt like someone in the driver’s seat actually knew where he was going, directed by an intuitive GPS taking him and me to an emotional place that made sense: sensorimotor emotions. I offer my review of his book in hopes it might shed light on clients you are working with or perhaps something within yourself as well.

In the Second Edition of her book, Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg revisits her 10 techniques for dealing with anxiety. She also revisits the companion workbook that provides activities to guide implementation of the techniques. These books are very accessible, even with the dispersed neuroscience throughout; they also have the advantage of catering to a wide audience including, but not limited to, those who are participating in psychotherapy. Her 10 techniques offer various ways to manage three arenas in which anxiety manifests itself: the body, the mind, and behavior. The workbook offers several, different ways to make the managing of anxiety actionable and consistent. By taking this two-pronged approach, Dr. Wehrenberg captures a large swath of information and applies it thus making her books a potential one-stop-shop for anxiety management. To fully appreciate the workbook, one must first read the technique book that serves to explain, in depth, what they are, why they work, and how to use them. Utilizing developments in neuroscience, Dr. Wehrenberg updates her 10 techniques by refining those at the forefront, providing new research-based evidence for them, and clarifying how they should be used (I).

The reading specialist in me refused to wait. Meghan Cox Gurdon’s essay in The Wall Street Journal (January 19-20, 2019), adapted from her new book, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction, inspired me.

"This book proposes a new code for reading the body that allows us to discover the intelligent sense of difficulty and to understand why we are the person that we are. It is presented within narratives of life stories from group supervision sessions. The body has sense because of the marks incised left from life’s experiences. It has sense in the highest and deepest meaning of the word because of its multi-sensorial intelligence that reads between the lines of communications and relationships, with the tastes and flavours, with visual and physical contact, with the tone of voice and the field atmospheres. "

Through Windows of Opportunity, by neuroaffective psychotherapist Marianne Bentzen, and child psychologist and psychotherapist Susan Hart, is based on the presentations of four international leading psychotherapists concerning different neuroaffective approaches to child psychotherapy at a 2012 conference in Copenhagen. These presentations revolve around how the relationship between therapist and child can aid the child in overcoming traumas and insecure attachments in life by fostering a sense of emotional attunement and tolerance that stimulates development and change processes.

In a deeply raw, emotional, and sentimental coming of age story, Porochista Khakpour dives into an exploration of her heritage, culture, and identity. Brown Album is far more than a collection of essays, it is a collection of memories showcasing self-discovery as a first-generation immigrant from Iran as well as shining a light on the Iranian-American experience.