We here at the Independent love every piece we run. There are no winners or losers. Seriously, though, here are May’s winners.
- Y.S. Fing’s review of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis (Little, Brown Spark). “Unable to ignore the festering society he is surrounded by, Christakis acknowledges the challenges to our hopes, that it may very well be that our civilizations will collapse. Still, he sees further, to ‘the vindication of our confidence in the virtue of society despite its numerous failures…This is not just idle optimism. Rather it’s a recognition of the fundamental good that lies within us.’”
- “The Unlikable Novel,” a column by Alice Stephens. “Usually, it is painful for a writer to get negative feedback on her work. But when the criticism reflects more on the reader’s inability to interrogate her own narrow view than on my authorial talent, I hold out hope that my book may have introduced that first crack in the reader’s one-sided view of adoption through which, as Leonard Cohen said, ‘the light comes in.’”
- Bob Duffy’s review of The Current: A Novel by Tim Johnston (Algonquin Books). “The Current is not your conventional, frenetically paced page-turner, although it smolders with a brooding, slow-burn tension that nudges the reader forward, catching you up in the lives of the troubled solitaries at the book’s core. Beneath its mystery-novel trappings — wielded with consummate mastery by the author — The Current is also a novel about the haunting persistence of memory.”
- Drew Gallagher’s review of Miracle Creek: A Novel by Angie Kim (Sarah Crichton Books). “In the end, Miracle Creek proves to be not so much a whodunit as an existential reflection on the choices people make — or don’t make — and the ripples those choices send through others’ lives to miraculous, often devastating effect.”
- Tyler Cymet’s interview with Patrick J. Crocker, author of Letters from the Pit: Stories of a Physician's Odyssey in Emergency Medicine. “We have a frontal lobe for a reason, to override that fast-reacting amygdala that can lead us into so many errors and more fully consider the situation. We all need to learn to exercise that control as a clinical skill. Metacognition, or ‘thinking about our thinking,’ could help prevent many of the recognized cognitive-error traps we can fall into during our care for patients.”
Click here to get our free biweekly e-newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest! And if you’d like to advertise with us, click here.
Like what we do? Click here to support the nonprofit Independent!
