100 books like On Media Memory

This is one of the best critical surveys of the relationship between memory and history I have encountered. Geoffrey Cubitt is concerned with memory as both personal and social, along with the various dynamics between them. The book is interdisciplinary in conception and operation, exploring how history and memory inform one another in complementary and contradictory ways, and how both cross and re-cross varying scales of past/present relations. Regardless of whether readers approach this book from the perspective of memory or history, they will find it a comprehensive assessment of their complex interaction.

Focusing in the main on the psychology of memory, in this excellent book Kurt Danziger argues that conceptually memory has changed considerably over time, not least because of the shifting historical contexts in which it has been applied. The book covers such critical issues as different kinds of memory, memory and metaphor, the cultivation of memory, and memory and truth. Danziger’s contention throughout the book is that memory and remembering are ineluctably social, and any sound understanding of them needs to account for how various historical factors and cultural practices have shaped and helped constitute them. 

In this book Max Silverman focuses on the remembering and understanding of extreme violence and terror, arguing against the tendency to separate different histories from each other along ethno-cultural lines. In countering this tendency, he conceives of the present not as an isolated moment but rather as a composite structure made up of different temporal traces from the past, lying in varying layers of visibility within the present, each of them capable of mediating, and being transformed by, another. Silverman builds a cogent case for the ways in which history, memory and imagination overlap and interact. After reading this book, it is difficult, if not impossible, to mount a defence of memory as authentic, sovereign, and autonomous. 

A predominant amount of work in memory studies has focused on national memory cultures. The shift in this anthology is towards small, local or regional memories and towards vernacular sites of remembering. Its contributors attend in the main to personal and familial forms of memory, and thus on the narrative modes and media associated with them. The chapters cover a fascinating range of topics, making for a diverse volume united by a key preoccupation with the locatedness of memory, rather than referring broadly across a whole national context or to a huge sweeping range of memory and remembering. This is a very welcome shift, bringing to the fore everyday objects of memory that have tended to be less predominant—hence ‘peripheral’, in the sense of being swept aside or overshadowed. Redressing this allows for a more complex understanding of relations between public and private memory and remembering practices, across varying temporal… show more.

Even if you have the best intentions heading into a conversation, powerful emotions can easily derail the entire interaction. You headed in wanting to stay calm, but something your spouse, co-worker, or fellow church member said triggered your hot button surfacing powerful emotions. Soon, voices are raised and feelings are hurt. How do you manage powerful emotions when they surface? If you’ve never read a book by the creators of the Harvard Negotiation Project—the leading experts in mediation—this is a must-read by experts who have had to manage the most difficult and potentially explosive conversations imaginable. They remind us that emotions are “powerful, always present, and hard to handle.” Yet, the authors offer practical ways to recognize the emotions you have heading into a conversation with someone you care about and how to deal with them once they surface. 

Our mental health has been compromised and the overall health of the planet destroyed because the mechanistic worldview of modernity has long assured us that we live apart from nature, more or less on top of it. This book—actually a boxed set of five short paperbacks: Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice—is a beautiful, deeply engaging antidote to modern alienation. The focus is on memoirs and storytelling because sharing stories is the way we humans make sense of the vast interrelatedness that is our reality. The aim here is a fuller understanding of Kinship Writ Large and the ways in which each of us can become better kin. The wise co-editors who chose these pieces include Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the acclaimed book Braiding Sweetgrass.

Like the best memoirs, this one reads like a novel in that Arthur Fleischman and his wife and children are drawn with so much honesty and detail you’ll feel as if you know them, or know people like them. Daughter Carly, however, is less knowable, because her childhood diagnosis of autism, cognitive delay, and oral motor apraxia (difficulty easily coordinating and initiating movement of the jaw, lips, tongue, and soft palate) had left her unable to communicate.

Carly’s Voice was one of the early books to explore, first-hand, the challenges of living with autism for the autistic individual as well as her family. Through the determined efforts of her parents and therapists who refused to stop helping Carly reach her full potential, Carly learns to type! That changes everything. Readers are privileged to peek inside the thoughts, feelings, and quirky sense of humor of an inspiring young woman who… show more.

Black software, McIlwain writes, “refers to the programs we desire and design computers to run. It refers to who designs the program, for what purposes, and what or who becomes its object and data.” The book is a much needed examination of the role that Black entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, and users contributed in building the internet.

As the co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project, I am committed to re-introducing civility back into our public disagreements. However, civility is often a misunderstood concept. Murray does a wonderful job pointing out what civility is not—mere niceness without purpose. He reminds us that civility is not the ultimate goal in our disagreements. Rather, it is a means of communication—rules we can agree on—that allows us to dig deep into the issues which easily separate us. If you find that politics are putting emotional distance between you and those close to you, then this is the book for you.  

Sensitive and insightful, The Validation Breakthrough is an essential resource for families, friends, neighbors, home health aides, doctors, nurses, social workers, and long-term care staff.

I learned as I read this book the necessity of walking beside the elderly in the final life stage. I learned empathy and to listen and talk with them, rather than patronizing them or telling them what to do. And I learned a very different understanding of why those with dementia symptoms do the things that they do-how the decline in cognitive abilities affects them in a very individual way, and to better understand the reasons behind their disorientation and sometimes challenging behavior.

The Validation Breakthrough was the foundation for my dementia care programs and method, and I often recommend this to all my family and professional clients to help raise their dementia awareness.