Primal Tears
A cross between a human and a bonobo? Carl Sagan and others have speculated: Is it possible? What kind of creature would it be? And how might this affect our world? Kelpie Wilson takes the premise and runs with it in this engaging novel. Primal Tears is the story of Sage, born to a young woman who has volunteered to be a surrogate mother for an endangered species of chimpanzee. The process goes awry, and Sage, a lovable youngster, is neither completely one species nor the other. When her existence becomes public knowledge, she needs all the best characteristics of both species to find a place for herself in our human-dominated world.
Tears
In Tears, the author explores theoretical issues raised by the intersection of philosophy, literature, art, architecture, and theology. The critical accounts of thinkers like Derrida, Blanchot, Jabès, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Austin, Ayre, Rorty, Tillich, Barth, and Altizer developed in this book effectively reshape and refocus the terms of current debate.
Tears of My Mother
When star of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Potomac Dr. Wendy Osefo was growing up, her mother was her everything. But when she became a mother herself, everything changed. In this “exquisitely-drawn portrait of the intense bond that only a mother can have with a daughter” (Katie Haufner, author of Mother Daughter Me), Wendy explores how her Nigerian upbringing has affected her life, her success, and her role as a parent. Wendy Osefo’s mother, Iyom Susan Okuzu, arrived in the United States from Nigeria with two things: a single suitcase and the fierce determination to make a better life for herself and her future family. And she succeeded: starting out working in a fast-food restaurant and ultimately becoming the director of nursing at a major metropolitan hospital. While Susan may have taken pride in triumphing over every financial and emotional challenge, in Nigerian culture, a parent is only as successful as his or her children. And so her daughter, with gratitude and appreciation for her mother’s sacrifices, worked hard to meet every demand Susan made of her. With four advanced degrees and a position at Johns Hopkins University as a professor—as well as being a highly sought-after political commentator, a cherished wife, and a loving mother of three—Dr. Wendy has given her mother bragging rights for life. But at what cost to herself? In Tears of My Mother, the star of The Real Housewives of Potomac describes growing up as a first-generation American, balancing two distinct cultures. And she takes a critical look at the paradox of her mother’s parenting: approval conditioned by achievement. As a teenager, Wendy struggled to carve out her own identity while still walking the narrow path of her mother’s expectations. Unwavering family loyalty and obedience gave Wendy the road map to making it in America, but it also drove a wedge between mother and daughter, never more so than when she began to build her own family. “A love letter to Dr. Osefo’s mother and first-generation immigrants all across America” (Library Journal), this book is for anyone who has faced conflict in the mother-daughter relationship or wondered how much of their own upbringing they want to pass on to the next generation.
Weeping Britannia
There is a persistent myth about the British: that we are a nation of stoics, with stiff upper lips, repressed emotions, and inactive lachrymal glands. Weeping Britannia - the first history of crying in Britain - comprehensively debunks this myth. Far from being a persistent element in the 'national character', the notion of the British stiff upper lip was in fact the product of a relatively brief and militaristic period of our past, from about 1870 to 1945. In earlier times we were a nation of proficient, sometimes virtuosic moral weepers. To illustrate this perhaps surprising fact, Thomas Dixon charts six centuries of weeping Britons, and theories about them, from the medieval mystic Margery Kempe in the early fifteenth century, to Paul Gascoigne's famous tears in the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup. In between, the book includes the tears of some of the most influential figures in British history, from Oliver Cromwell to Margaret Thatcher (not forgetting George III, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, and Winston Churchill along the way). But the history of weeping in Britain is not simply one of famous tear-stained individuals. These tearful micro-histories all contribute to a bigger picture of changing emotional ideas and styles over the centuries, touching on many other fascinating areas of our history. For instance, the book also investigates the histories of painting, literature, theatre, music and the cinema to discover how and why people have been moved to tears by the arts, from the sentimental paintings and novels of the eighteenth century and the romantic music of the nineteenth, to Hollywood weepies, expressionist art, and pop music in the twentieth century. Weeping Britannia is simultaneously a museum of tears and a philosophical handbook, using history to shed new light on the changing nature of Britishness over time, as well as the ever-shifting ways in which we express and understand our emotional lives. The story that emerges is one in which a previously rich religious and cultural history of producing and interpreting tears was almost completely erased by the rise of a stoical and repressed British empire in the late nineteenth century. Those forgotten philosophies of tears and feeling can now be rediscovered. In the process, readers might perhaps come to view their own tears in a different light, as something more than mere emotional incontinence.
Adult Crying
Crying is a typical human expression of emotion. Surprisingly, until now little scientific attention has been devoted to this phenomenon. Many textbooks on emotion fail to pay attention to it, and in scientific journals there are hardly any contributions focusing on this behavior. In contrast, there is much interest from the lay public, allowing pseudo-scientists to formulate theories that have little or no scientific basis. Is there any evidence in support of statements that crying is healthy or that not crying may result in toxification? How do people react to the crying of others? Is crying important for the diagnosis of depression, and if so, how? This book aims to fill this gap in scientific literature. Crying is discussed from several perspectives and specific attention is given to methodological issues and assessment. Each chapter provides a review and a summary of the relevant scientific literature.
