Sunday, April 19, 2009

A Non-Fiction I would like to Read

Resilience by Boris Cyrulnik. "A household name [and psychoanalyst] in France, Cyrulnik is revered for his work on over-coming childhood trauma and helping heal the wounds left on the country by the second world war." [He himself is Jewish and is the only surviving member of his family during the Holocaust.] "'When I became a doctor, I was very personally hurt when I would hear people say of a child: 'No point in bothering with him. He is lost.' Knowing what I had gone through,' he taps his chest passionately, 'it felt like a condemnation.'" "He is fascinated by the paradox of wealth, especially in the consumerist west: the richer a society becomes, the more unhappy its people. 'It is not easy to have a family life in a rich country. Wealth fragments family life because people can travel in a way they can't in poor countries. Poverty is a barrier to many things, but it gives solidarity to family life. In modern life, the personality can flower, but we hold our families less dear.'" Viv Groskop, "Escape from the Past", The Guardian, April 18, 2009

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