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Seven deadly sins : the biology of being human / by Leschziner, Guy,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Seven Deadly Sins will explore the underlying nature of the seven deadly sins, their neuroscientific and psychological basis, and their origin in our genes. Gluttony. Greed. Sloth. Pride. Envy. Lust. Anger. These are The Seven Deadly Sins, the vices of humankind that define immorality. But do these sins really represent moral failings, or are they simply important and useful biological functions that humans need to survive? Instead of being acts of immorality, are they really just a result of how our bodies, our psyches, and our brains in particular, are wired? In Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human, Guy Leschziner, a professor of neurology, dares to turn much of what society thinks of as morality on its head and to ask these controversial questions. Leschziner takes readers on an exploration of the Seven Deadly Sins as he looks at their neuroscientific and psychological bases, their origin in our genes, and, crucially, how certain medical disorders may give rise to them. He introduces us to patients whose physical and psychological conditions have given rise to behaviours that have for centuries been labelled as "sin" and how these behaviours might actually be evolutionary imperatives that preserve the tribe and ensure the wellbeing of our societies. In Seven Deadly Sins, a book certain to cause debate and raise controversy, Guy Leschziner, a writer who has explored the mysteries of our sleeping brains and the odd crossed wires of our five senses, asks whether these traits truly represent sin, or simply reflect our intrinsic drive to survive and thrive"--
Subjects: Deadly sins.; Human behavior.; Neuropsychology.;

The book of fire : a novel / by Lefteri, Christy,1980-author.;
"In present-day Greece, deep in an ancient forest, lives a family: Irini, a musician, who teaches children to read and play music; her husband, Tasso, who paints pictures of the forest, his greatest muse; and Chara, their young daughter, whose name means joy. On the fateful day that will forever alter the trajectory of their lives, flames chase fleeing birds across the sky. The wildfire that will consume their home, and their lives as they know it, races toward them. In the smoldering aftermath, Irini stumbles upon the body of the man who started the fire, a land speculator who had intended only a small, controlled burn to clear forestland to build on and instead ignited a catastrophe. He is dead, although the cause is unclear, and in her anger at all he took from them, Irini makes a split-second decision that will haunt her. As the local police investigate the mysterious death, Tasso mourns his father, who has not been seen since before the fire. His hands were burnt in the flames, leaving him unable to paint, and he struggles to cope with the overwhelming loss of his artistic voice and his beloved forest. Only his young daughter, who wants to repair the damage that's been done, gives him hope for the future. Gorgeously written, sweeping in scope and intimate in tone, The Book of Fire is a masterful work about the search for meaning in the wake of tragedy, as well as the universal ties that bind people to each other, and to the land that they call home"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Families; Fires; Guilt; Life change events; Perseverance (Ethics); Resilience (Personality trait); Villages;

I felt the end before it came : memoirs of a queer ex-Jehovah's Witness / by Cox, Daniel Allen,author.;
Includes bibliographical references.""I spent eighteen years in a group that taught me to hate myself. You cannot be queer and a Jehovah's Witness--it's one or the other." Daniel Allen Cox grew up with firm lines around what his religion considered unacceptable: celebrating birthdays and holidays; voting in elections, pursuing higher education, and other forays into independent thought. Their opposition to blood transfusions would have consequences for his mother, just as their stance on homosexuality would for him. But even years after whispers of his sexual orientation reached his congregation's presiding elder, catalyzing his disassociation, the distinction between "in" and "out" isn't always clear. Still in the midst of a lifelong disentanglement, Cox grapples with the group's cultish tactics--from gaslighting to shunning--and their resulting harms--from simmering anger to substance abuse--all while redefining its concepts through a queer lens. Can Paradise be a bathhouse, a concert hall, or a room full of books? With great candour and disarming self-awareness, Cox takes readers on a journey from his early days as a solicitous door-to-door preacher in Montreal to a stint in New York City, where he's swept up in a scene of photographers and hustlers blurring the line between art and pornography. The culmination of years spent both processing and avoiding a complicated past, I Felt the End Before It Came reckons with memory and language just as it provides a blueprint to surviving a litany of Armageddons."--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Creative nonfiction.; Cox, Daniel Allen; Cox, Daniel Allen.; Ex-church members; Ex-church members; Gay men; Authors, Canadian (English);

Notes on grief / by Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi,1977-author.;
"Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father's death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page--and never without touches of rich, honest humor--Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father's death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he'd stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book--a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment-a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever--and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon"--
Subjects: Essays.; Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 1977-; Grief.; Bereavement; Fathers; Authors, Nigerian; Fathers and daughters;

Love can't feed you : a novel / by Sy, Cherry Lou,author.;
"A beautiful, tender yet searing debut novel about intergenerational fractures and coming of age, following a young woman who immigrates to the United States from the Philippines and finds herself adrift between familial expectations and her own burning desires Love Can't Feed You is a stunning, heartbreaking, and compressed look at coming of age, shifting notions of home, and the disintegration of the American dream. It asks us: What does it mean to be of multiple cultures without a road map for how to belong? After a harrowing flight, Queenie, her younger brother, and their elderly Chinese father arrive in the United States from the Philippines. They're here to finally reunite with Queenie's Filipina mother, who has been working as a nurse in Brooklyn for the past few years-building a life that everyone hopes will set them up for better prospects. But her mother is not the same woman she was in the Philippines: Something in her face is different, almost hardened, and she seems so American already. Queenie, on the cusp of adulthood, has big dreams of attending college, of spending her days immersed in the pages of books. But there is not enough money for her and her brother to both be in school, so first she must work. Queenie rotates through jobs and settles, tentatively, into her new life, but her brother begins to withdraw and act out, and her father's anger swells. As the pressures of assimilation compound, and the fissures within her family deepen into fractures, Queenie is left suspended between two countries, two identities, and two parents"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Domestic fiction.; Novels.; Families; Filipino Americans; Immigrants; Young women;

A real emergency : stories from the ambulance / by Sokol, Joanna,author.;
Includes bibliographical references.Introspective, richly layered, and surprisingly hopeful, A Real Emergency is a love letter from a paramedic to the best and worst parts of her career. For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger toward the strange world of emergency street medicine. As her career on the ambulance progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, the backs of gloves, and in the margins of EKG printouts. She listened to her patients' stories, left food out for their pets, and turned off the stove under their oxtail stews. Once, she read half a poem left in a dead woman's typewriter. She learned about the history that brought ambulances into their current role as the caretakers of society's forgotten and spoke to her colleagues about their own experiences and perspectives. Those reflections are collected here, in a series of raw, powerful essays about the state modern healthcare. Sokol's life as a paramedic took her to three different counties: the casinos and trailer parks of the Nevada desert, the cozy beach town of Santa Cruz, and, eventually, the crowded tenements of San Francisco's Tenderloin district. There are no clear villains or heroes in Sokol's world, only a group of patients and medics who are doing their best in a deeply broken system. Combining impactful research, compassionate reflections on her most memorable patients, and the strong voices of her fellow paramedics, Sokol takes readers deep into the everyday reality of 911 first responders, offering insight, empathy, and a reminder of both the power and limitations of care.
Subjects: Biographies.; Essays.; Personal narratives.; Sokol, Joanna.; Emergency medical services; Emergency medical technicians;

Beasts : what animals can teach us about the origins of good and evil / by Masson, J. Moussaieff(Jeffrey Moussaieff),1941-;
Includes bibliographical references and index."There are two supreme predators on the planet with the most complex brains in nature: humans and orcas. In the twentieth century alone, one of these animals killed 200 million members of its own species, the other has killed none. Jeffrey Masson's fascinating new book begins here: There is something different about us. In his previous bestsellers, Masson has showed that animals can teach us much about our own emotions--love (dogs), contentment (cats), grief (elephants), among others. But animals have much to teach us about negative emotions such as anger and aggression as well, and in unexpected ways. In Beasts he demonstrates that the violence we perceive in the "wild" is mostly a matter of projection. We link the basest human behavior to animals, to "beasts" ("he behaved no better than a beast"), and claim the high ground for our species. We are least human, we think, when we succumb to our primitive, animal ancestry. Nothing could be further from the truth. Animals, at least predators, kill to survive, but there is nothing in the annals of animal aggression remotely equivalent to the violence of mankind. Our burden is that humans, and in particular humans in our modern industrialized world, are the most violent animals to our own kind in existence, or possibly ever in existence on earth. We lack what all other animals have: a check on the aggression that would destroy the species rather than serve it. It is here, Masson says, that animals have something to teach us about our own history. In Beasts, he strips away our misconceptions of the creatures we fear, offering a powerful and compelling look at our uniquely human propensity toward aggression"--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Animal behavior.; Animal psychology.; Cruelty; Emotions in animals.; Violence;

The future is analog : how to create a more human world / by Sax, David,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."The beloved author of The Revenge of Analog lays out a case for a human future--not the false technological utopia we've been living. For years, consumers have been promised a simple, carefree digital future. We could live, work, learn, and play from the comforts of our homes, and have whatever we desire brought to our door with the flick of a finger. Instant communication would bring us together. Technological convenience would give us more time to focus on what really mattered. When the pandemic hit, that future transformed into the present, almost overnight. And the reviews aren't great. It turns out that leaving the house is underrated, instant communication spreads anger better than joy, and convenience takes away time rather than giving it to us. Oops. But as David Sax argues in this insightful book, we've also had our eyes opened. There is nothing about the future that has to be digital, and embracing the reality of human experience doesn't mean resisting change. In chapters exploring work, school, leisure, and more, Sax asks perceptive and pointed questions: what happens to struggling students when they're not in a classroom? If our software is built for productivity, who tends to the social and cultural aspects of our jobs? Can you have religion without community? For many people, the best parts of quarantine have been the least digital ones: baking bread, playing board games, going hiking. We used our hands and hugged our children and breathed fresh air. This book suggests that if we want a healthy future, we need to choose not convenience but community, not technology but humanity"--
Subjects: Technology; Technology;

The end of the myth : from the frontier to the border wall in the mind of America / by Grandin, Greg,1962-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump's border wall. Ever since this nation's inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States' belief in itself as an exceptional nation--democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America has a new symbol: the border wall. In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history--from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America's constant expansion--fighting wars and opening markets--served as a "gate of escape," helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that the country's problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. And now, the combined catastrophe of the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home. It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarization that catapulted Trump to the presidency. The border wall may or may not be built, but it will survive as a rallying point, an allegorical tombstone marking the end of American exceptionalism"--
Subjects: Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1861-1932; Frontier thesis.; Borderlands; National characteristics, American.; Exceptionalism; Nationalism;

Saint of the Narrows Street [electronic resource] : by Boyle, William.aut; cloudLibrary;
As an Italian American family's decades-old secret begins to unravel, they will have to bear the consequences—and face each other—in this thrilling south Brooklyn-set tragic opera of the highest caliber from crime fiction luminary William Boyle. William Boyle is the master of Brooklyn-set crime fiction and Saint of the Narrows Street is his magnum opus. For fans of The Sopranos, Jonathan Lethem, and Dennis Lehane. Gravesend, Brooklyn, 1986: Risa Franzone lives in a ground-floor apartment on Saint of the Narrows Street with her bad-seed husband, Saverio, and their eight-month-old baby, Fabrizio. On the night Risa’s younger sister, Giulia, moves in to recover from a bad breakup, a fateful accident occurs: Risa, boiled over with anger and fear, strikes a drunk, erratic Sav with a cast-iron pan, killing him on the spot. The sisters are left with a choice: notify the authorities and make a case for self-defense, or bury the man’s body and go on with their lives as best they can. In a moment of panic, in the late hours of the night, they call upon Sav’s childhood friend—the sweet, loyal Christopher “Chooch” Gardini—to help them, hoping they can trust him to carry a secret like this. Over the vast expanse of the next eighteen years, life goes on in the working-class Italian neighborhood of Gravesend as Risa, Giulia, Chooch, and eventually Fabrizio grapple with what happened that night. A standout work of character-driven crime fiction from a celebrated author of the form, Saint of the Narrows Street is a searing and richly drawn novel about the choices we make and how they shape our lives.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Crime;
© 2025., Soho Press,

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