Books and Me

By Jason Fox (2018) This  is a gripping, convincing read for which the actual writer, Matt Allen, should take a lot of  credit, not least because until I got to the acknowledgements right at the end, I had managed to persuade myself that Jason's voice was largely authentically his.   OK, so you could see that the book was beautifully structured and that this sort of level of writing skill isn't something people normally acquire when they've spent their entire adult life busting through doors and shooting the threats that lie behind it, so I guess I should have just got on and accepted this fact - but in some regards, it still sounded like the Jason you hear on  Who Dares Wins,  so I just wanted to believe.  But really, duh, in retrospect what was I thinking! One regular feature of PTSD, to which Jason bravely admits, is that it closes down Broca's area - the part of the brain that is responsible for speech.  It is quite possibl...

by Robert I. Sutton (2017) This i s, just as Daniel Pink says on the cover, a contemporary classic. If everyone were to read it, take it to heart and act on it, our planet would be an infinitely better place.  Sutton explains not only how to identify an "asshole", (sorry, there is no other satisfactory word -believe me, I've dug around in thesauri and the darkest reaches of the minds of friends and relatives, and have not yet come up with a satisfactory replacement), he also provides numerous ideas about how to deal with them, some of which strike me as inspired, (the Benjamin Franklin effect being one of these), but for the icing on the cake, he also requires that the reader look in the mirror in order to make sure they are not the asshole in the room! So it works for everyone, the asshole as well as the victim.  And of course, most of us have our moments.  It takes a masterful saint not to lapse at some point, though we might as well aim high, I guess. A must rea...

by Bessel Van Der Kolk (2015) Where to start?  This book is monumental, being vast in scope, beautifully argued and hugely significant all at once.  It is also deeply humane and potentially healing.  It would have been very easy for Bessel to have turned out an angry diatribe but instead he quietly makes his case, and you only gradually begin to clock, whilst reading between the lines, that his argument represents a huge challenge to current psychiatric, schooling and social services. His argument is that the epidemic of unhappiness which is currently so often attributed to snowflakery/lack of resilience is actually, often as not, a response to deeply traumatic events which for whatever reason, we do not really want to acknowledge or confront. So instead of blaming the victim or imposing deeply cruel methods of treatment (he gently explains why CBT so often fails),  Bessel gets about delineating the effects of trauma upon the mind, brain and body, an...