Review by New York Times Review
NOBODY: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, From Ferguson to Flint and Beyond, by Marc Lamont Hill. (Atria, $16.) Hill analyzes such high-profile deaths as Michael Brown's, Sandra Bland's and Trayvon Martin's to explore a system of negligence and indifference. The state has effectively abandoned those whom Hill calls "Nobodies": people marked as black, brown, immigrant, queer. LOSING IT, by Emma Rathbone. (Riverhead, $16.) Julia, the heroine of Rathbone's novel, is 26, professionally adrift and - most vexing of all - still a virgin. During previous opportunities, she always demurred, certain that a better one would come along, but now, "my virginity composed about 99 percent of my thought traffic." When she goes to live with her aunt, her quest to finally have a sexual encounter is complicated by a family member's revelation. THE WICKED BOY: An Infamous Murder in Victorian London, by Kate Summerscale. (Penguin, $17.) In 1895,13-year-old Robert Coombes and his younger brother were traipsing alone around East London. Days later, their mother was found dead, and Robert was sent to one of England's most infamous prisons. Summerscale reconstructs the case and its aftermath with forensic care. DARK MATTER, by Blake Crouch. (Broadway, $16.) After he is violently kidnapped, Jason, a married professor in Chicago, awakes as a different man entirely: His wife is not his wife, his child has not been born and he is working on a brilliant project. As Jason's various selves confront one another and he embarks on multiple paths, he must grapple with the question of which of his lives is real. Crouch draws on disparate influences in his thriller, which our reviewer, Andrew O'Hehir, called "alternate-universe science fiction bolstered by a smidgen of theoretical physics." UNFORBIDDEN PLEASURES, by Adam Phillips. (Picador, $16.) In a series of essays, Phillips, a British psychoanalyst, explores the meaning and the role of everyday indulgences in contemporary life. While others focus on the taboo, Phillips writes, "the seekers of unforbidden pleasures may know something about pleasure that has never occurred to the transgressive." SWEET LAMB OF HEAVEN, by Lydia Millet. (Norton, $15.95.) After her daughter, Lena, is born, Anna begins hearing streams of voices - both foreign and English, and not violent - a hallucination that resists diagnosis. When her marriage dissolves, she and Lena escape from Alaska, where they were living, to a hotel in Maine; but when her husband considers a political run, they must constantly evade his reach.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 30, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Psychoanalyst Phillips (On Balance, 2010) uses the inestimable Oscar Wilde as his inspiration to explore the various meanings and importance attached to the concept of the unforbidden before moving on to Adam and Eve, our first parents, and the work of the world's greatest psychoanalytic thinkers, from Sigmund Freud to Melanie Klein. We think about forbidden pleasures, and often; To forbid something is to make it unforgettable, Phillips writes. That is, to forbid is to guarantee attention. But, Phillips contends, we can get as much pleasure from topics that are not forbidden. Although he admits that permitted pleasures are relatively harmless and that most of us believe harmful pleasures are better, he suggests that a great deal of pleasure can, in fact, be enjoyed in unforbidden activities. But how do you get people to change their pleasures, or stick to the pleasures that are approved? Alas, he has no definitive answers. Instead, he explores, in a wide-ranging discussion, such topics as ethics, great art, the pleasure of language, and the concept of obedience. The many books he touches on include Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Milton's Paradise Lost. An erudite look at a subject most of us ignore, if we consider it at all.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Phillips (On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored), a British psychoanalyst, explores the tension between "forbidden" and "unforbidden" pleasures in this dense, erudite book. Going back to the story of Genesis and to Milton's retelling of it in Paradise Lost, he argues that modern Western culture remains constrained by the association between the pleasurable and the taboo. In reality, Phillips asserts, people often draw more pleasure from the ordinary things in life-a morning cup of coffee, one another's company, kindness-than from forbidden acts. He goes on to name more unforbidden pleasures, including self-criticism and obedience, noting about the latter that "whom we obey and how we obey-and what we are doing when we obey-will be the defining factors in our lives." Philips suggests that people can become less judgmental about permissible types of pleasure by changing their moral vocabulary. In this, he draws inspiration from the writings of Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, each of whom, he shows, recommended the replacement of certain words with others-"beauty" rather than "goodness," "delight" rather than "duty"-in order to reshape people's underlying ideas. Digressive and often paradoxical, this slim volume is rich in psychological, philosophical, and literary insight. Agent: Amy Rennert, Amy Rennert Agency. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Traditionally, "forbidden fruit" has been viewed as a harmful but supreme lure for humanity. Psychoanalyst and visiting professor Phillips (English, Univ. of York, UK; Going Sane) examines the effects of this outlook on psychology and the social order. Beginning with Oscar Wilde but dense with other classic references, the author discusses the concepts of forbidden and unforbidden pleasures. The former can be understood as a reflection of the Ten Commandments and includes transgressions against other moral principles. Phillips notes how psychoanalysis itself focuses on the forbidden. Less-intuitive notions of pleasures such as obedience and self-criticism are then discussed. Drawing on British psychoanalytic work, he details life-enhancing forms of unforbidden pleasure to include affection, friendship, and imagination, which are considered as necessary antidotes to the tyranny of forbidden pleasure on social life. The book concludes with a discussion of the meaning of life and its enjoyment. The author intimates that modern Western society would benefit from more emphasis on unforbidden pleasure in morality and social organization but provides no easy pathway to such a change. VERDICT An abstract but bold social critique and meditation that may require a humanistic background to appreciate fully.--Antoinette Brinkman, formerly with Southwest Indiana Mental Health Ctr. Lib., Evansville © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
What would society look like if it did not promote the idea "that we are primarily a danger to ourselves and others"? In his latest philosophical exploration of mind, selfhood, and desire, prolific British psychoanalyst Phillips (Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, 2014, etc.) asks how the idea of forbidden pleasures shapes thought and behavior. "This book," he writes, "is about whether the unforbidden pleasures have something more to tell us, or at least something else to tell us, about pleasure than the forbidden ones." The "tyranny of the forbidden," he maintains, "is not that it forbids, but that it tells us what we wantto do the forbidden thing." What is forbidden, then, "narrows our minds, narrows our picture of ourselves"in short, it circumscribes our freedom to know ourselves. Phillips draws on wide-ranging sources from literature (Shakespeare, Milton, Wilde), philosophy (Nietzsche, Jonathan Lear, Stuart Hampshire), and psychology (Freud, of course, and also Jacques Lacan, D.W. Winnicott, and neuropsychologist Brenda Milner) in his discussions of obedience, self-criticism, sexual taboos, and the concept of the superego. "The Freudian superego," writes Phillips, "is a boring and vicious soliloquist with an audience of one," a "made-up voice" distinct from the religious and cultural legacy of conscience. The patient undergoing analysis "discovers he is the casualty of forgotten obediences," not all of which he may want to discard. Psychoanalysis encourages a conversation about the forbidden, allowing the patient a chance to make choices "about which rules he believes are worth following, and which rules he has merely been following, consciously or unconsciously, for fear of punishment." Finding pleasure in the unforbidden, Phillips suggests, means "finding new kinds of heroes and heroines (or dispensing with them)" and redefining what we mean by satisfaction. A dense, challenging, provocative meditation on morality and identity. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
