Amherst Reads All Books

Western political philosophers since Plato have used the family as a model for harmonious political and social relations. Yet, far from being an uncontentious domain for shared interests and common values, the family is often the scene of intense interpersonal conflict and disagreement. In All in the Family, political theorist Kennan Ferguson reconsiders the family, in its varied forms, as an exemplar of democratic politics and suggests how real rather than idealized family dynamics can help us to better understand and navigate political conflict. By closely observing the attachments that arise in families despite profound disagreements, Ferguson argues, we can imagine a political engagement that accommodates radical differences without sacrificing community. After examining how the concept of the family has been deployed and misused in political philosophy, Ferguson turns to the ways in which families actually operate: the macro-political significance of family coping strategies such as silence and the impact that disability and care-giving have on conceptions of spatiality, sameness, and disparity. He also considers the emotional attachment between humans and their pets as an acknowledgement that compassion and community can exist even under conditions of profound differences.

Henry Cornwall, a senior art historian, is acting president of Mead College in western Massachusetts. Unfortunately, he is passed over for the presidency in favor of an aggressive younger woman. Henry expects that he will return to his department to spend his last active years before his eventual retirement. But to his surprise, he is contacted by Professor Soo-lin Lee, head of a search committee at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York City. She asks if he would be interested in becoming director of a new program to train non-traditional and minority students for careers in the commercial art world. Henry is excited by the prospect, and his wife Caroline encourages him to pursue it. He is invited to take the job, but Caroline refuses to move to the dangerous neighborhood in New York where Henry decides he must live to be credible to students. When he becomes romantically involved with Soo-lin, his marriage comes under severe pressure. The new program encounters faculty resistance and the hostility of a new director of the institute. Nothing is going according to plan, but Henry persists against heavy odds. Meanwhile, Henry’s niece Simone, a graduate student at Columbia, has become pregnant and the father is behaving strangely. Henry and Caroline confer with Simone’s parents in France, and Simone’s friend Rachel Harper steps in to help as Simone’s due date approaches. Henry then goes to Paris to help manage a crisis in the health of his older brother. Yet ultimately, issues regarding his job and his intimate relationships must be resolved before he can arrive at a significant conclusion regarding his future career.

In the last twenty years, meditation and mindfulness have gone from being kind of cool to becoming an omnipresent Band-Aid for fixing everything from your weight to your relationship to your achievement level. Unveiling here the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them giants in their fields, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson show us the truth about what meditation can really do for us, as well as exactly how to get the most out of it.
           
Sweeping away common misconceptions and neuromythology to open readers’ eyes to the ways data has been distorted to sell mind-training methods, the authors demonstrate that beyond the pleasant states mental exercises can produce, the real payoffs are the lasting personality traits that can result. But short daily doses will not get us to the highest level of lasting positive change—even if we continue for years—without specific additions. More than sheer hours, we need smart practice, including crucial ingredients such as targeted feedback from a master teacher and a more spacious, less attached view of the self, all of which are missing in widespread versions of mind training. The authors also reveal the latest data from Davidson’s own lab that point to a new methodology for developing a broader array of mind-training methods with larger implications for how we can derive the greatest benefits from the practice.
           
Exciting, compelling, and grounded in new research, this is one of those rare books that has the power to change us at the deepest level.