The Avid Reader Show

Samuel Hankin
  • 3.6 (43)
  • BOOKS
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The Avid Reader Show

The Avid Reader is a podcast for book lovers. Tune in for interviews, recommendations, and insider news from Sam Hankin, host and owner of independent bookstore Wellington Square Bookshop - www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com

  1. 1 HR. AGO

    Lewis Cohen MD - Winter's End: Dementia and Dying

    Arguably among the worst of all medical afflictions, the dementias slowly destroy one's personality, take a tremendous emotional, physical, and financial toll on patients and families, and are irreversible and inexorably fatal. Winter's End: Dementia and Its Life-Shortening Options is constructed around a lengthy and detailed nonfiction account that is layered with the voices of approximately 100 palliative medicine practitioners, legal scholars, bioethicists, social workers, nurses, neurologists, psychiatrists, and other authorities from North America and Europe.This book explores how and when one might prepare to foreshorten life after being diagnosed with a dementing illness, while not ignoring the reality that for most people such actions are unthinkable and unacceptable. Dan Winter was one of the exceptions, and after being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, he resolved to hasten his death. He struggled over what method to employ and the timing of when to act.Winter's End is intended to catalyze conversations between clinicians, people affected by dementias, and the general public. It is a spellbinding and provocative book about a taboo subject that is increasingly germane to all aging societies that value patient autonomy.Lewis Cohen, MD is a professor emeritus of Psychiatry and a Palliative Medicine researcher, who has received numerous literary and academic honours. He is a Guggenheim fellow and was a Rockefeller Bellagio scholar and a Bogliasco Foundation resident. He is a recipient of the Thomas and Eleanor Hackett Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry and his research has been funded by NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As a medical student, Dr. Cohen studied under Anna Freud, who interested him in end-of-life issues.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9780197748640

    1h 4m
  2. Rowan Jacobsen - Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul

    2 HR. AGO

    Rowan Jacobsen - Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul

    When Rowan Jacobsen first heard of a chocolate bar made entirely from wild Bolivian cacao, he was skeptical. The waxy mass-market chocolate of his childhood had left him indifferent to it, and most experts believed wild cacao had disappeared from the rainforest centuries ago. But one dazzling bite of Cru Sauvage was all it took. Chasing chocolate down the supply chain and back through history, Jacobsen travels the rainforests of the Amazon and Central America to find the chocolate makers, activists, and indigenous leaders who are bucking the system that long ago abandoned wild and heirloom cacao in favor of high-yield, low-flavor varietals preferred by Big Chocolate.What he found was a cacao renaissance. As his guides pulled the last vestiges of ancient cacao back from the edge of extinction, they'd forged an alternative system in the process-one that is bringing prosperity back to local economies, returning fertility to the land, and protecting it from the rampages of cattle farming. All the while, a new generation of bean-to-bar chocolate makers are racing to get theirhands on these rare varietals and produce extraordinary chocolate displaying a diversity of flavors no one had thought possible. Full of vivid characters, vibrant landscapes, and surprising history, Wild Chocolate promises to be as rich, complex, and addictive as good chocolate itself.Rowan Jacobsen is the author of eight books, including the James Beard Award-winning A Geography of Oysters and 2021's Truffle Hound. He has written for the New York Times, Harper's, Outside, Food & Wine, Forbes, Mother Jones, Scientific American, Smithsonian, Vice, and others, and he appears regularly in Best American Science & Nature Writing and Best Food Writing. He has been an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, a McGraw Center fellow, and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. The creator and host of the 2022 podcast series "Wild Chocolate," he lives in Vermont.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781639733576

    50 min
  3. Debbie Urbanski - After World

    AUG 28

    Debbie Urbanski - After World

    A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel—only for it to fall in love with the novel’s subject, Sen, the last human on Earth.Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is simple: remove humans from the ecosystem.Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in Upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains.[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc’s assignment is to capture Sen’s life, and they set about doing this using the novels of the 21st century as a roadmap. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don’t, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect.As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen’s whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative, until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own.Debbie Urbanski is a writer, nature lover, and human whose stories and essays have been published widely in such places as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Granta, Orion, and Junior Great Books. A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, she can often be found hiking with her family in the hills south of Syracuse, New York. After World is her first novel.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781668023457

    1h 1m
  4. Roz Dineen - Briefly Very Beautiful: A Novel

    AUG 28

    Roz Dineen - Briefly Very Beautiful: A Novel

    Roz Dineen’s Briefly Very Beautiful is a spellbinding dystopian novel about the lengths one will go to for their children in a world teetering on the edge of apocalypse. In a land destabilized by unsafe air, wildfires, floods, viruses, supply shortages, and homegrown terror, Cass is raising three small children by herself in the city. Her husband, Nathaniel, has gone all too willingly to serve as a medic in an overseas war.His absence, and Cass’s isolation, has brought her into an exhausted but harmonious rhythm with the children; while it’s a frightening time, there is also a surprising, quiet tenderness in living on the edge of societal collapse. When things start to feel more dangerous in the city, Cass evacuates with the children to her mother-in-law’s house deep in the countryside. Initially, it’s a place of safety, but her mother-in-law’s erratic behavior and increasing grip over the children worries Cass, and so they flee again to a commune on the coast. It’s an idyllic place, but Cass comes to suspect this seemingly harmonious community has a dark underbelly. Briefly Very Beautiful is a magnetic novel about love and resilience. Against a wider backdrop of a world imploding, it is an exploration of hope and fear, beauty and joy, as well as seismic betrayal.Roz Dineen’s lush prose combines with epic and precise world-building to create a society that feels at once unrecognizable but deeply, chillingly familiar. The result is a compelling portrait of what it is to parent through apocalypse.Roz Dineen was an editor at the Times Literary Supplement for 12 years, serving as fiction editor and later features editor. She has also written extensively for the Times Literary Supplement, where her essays and reviews have covered a range of topics from addiction to motherhood, from Jonathan Franzen to J. G. Ballard and Sally Rooney. She studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, received a master’s degree in international studies and diplomacy from SOAS, London.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781419767951

    46 min
  5. Chris French - The Science Of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure The Paranormal

    AUG 28

    Chris French - The Science Of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure The Paranormal

    An accessible and gratifying introduction to the world of paranormal beliefs and bizarre experiences.Ghostly encounters, alien abduction, reincarnation, talking to the dead, UFO sightings, inexplicable coincidences, out-of-body and near-death experiences. Are these legitimate phenomena? If not, then how should we go about understanding them? In this fascinating book, Chris French investigates paranormal claims to discover what lurks behind this “weird shit.” French provides authoritative evidence-based explanations for a wide range of superficially mysterious phenomena, and then goes further to draw out lessons with wider applications to many other aspects of modern society where critical thinking is urgently needed.Using academic, comprehensive, logical, and, at times, mathematical approaches, The Science of Weird Shit convincingly debunks ESP, communicating with the dead, and alien abduction claims, among other phenomena. All the while, however, French maintains that our belief in such phenomena is neither ridiculous nor trivial; if anything, such claims can tell us a great deal about the human mind if we pay them the attention they are due. Filled with light-bulb moments and a healthy dose of levity, The Science of Weird Shit is a clever, memorable, and gratifying read you won’t soon forget.Chris French is Emeritus Professor and Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Patron of Humanists UK. He is the coauthor of Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9780262048361

    58 min
  6. Adam Forrest Kay - Escape From Shadow Physics: The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory

    AUG 22

    Adam Forrest Kay - Escape From Shadow Physics: The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory

    The received wisdom in quantum physics is that, at the deepest levels of reality, there are no actual causes for atomic events. This idea led to the outlandish belief that quantum objects—indeed, reality itself—aren’t real unless shaped by human measurement. Einstein mocked this idea, asking whether his bed spread out across his room unless he looked at it. And yet it remains one of the most influential ideas in science and our culture.  In Escape from Shadow Physics, Adam Forrest Kay takes up Einstein’s torch: reality isn’t mysterious or dependent on human measurement, but predictable and independent of us. At the heart of his argument is groundbreaking research with little drops of oil. These droplets behave as particles do in the long-overlooked quantum theory of pilot waves; crucially, they showcase quantum behavior while being described by classical physics. And that classical-quantum interface points to a true understanding of quantum mechanics and a reasonable universe. A bold and essential reset of the field, Escape from Shadow Physics describes the kind of true scientific revolution that comes along just once—or less—in a century.Adam Forrest Kay has two PhDs, one in literature from the University of Cambridge and the other in mathematics from the University of Oxford. He is currently a postdoctoral associate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781541675780

    50 min
  7. Christy Spackman: The Taste of Water Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage

    AUG 22

    Christy Spackman: The Taste of Water Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage

    Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this unique history uncovers the foundational role of palatability in shaping Western water treatment processes. By focusing on the relationship between taste and the environment, Christy Spackman shows how efforts to erase unwanted tastes and smells have transformed water into a highly industrialized food product divorced from its origins. The Taste of Water invites readers to question their own assumptions about what water does and should naturally taste like while exposing them to the invisible—but substantial—sensory labor involved in creating tap water.Christy Spackman is Assistant Professor of Art/Science at Arizona State University and Director of the Sensory Labor(atory), an experimental research collective dedicated to creatively disrupting longstanding sensory hierarchies.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9780520393547

    43 min
  8. Martin Fitzgibbon - Behind The Curtain: My Life And Rocky Horror

    AUG 9

    Martin Fitzgibbon - Behind The Curtain: My Life And Rocky Horror

    It's 1973 and The Rocky Horror Show is about to be launched onto an unsuspecting world for the first time. Martin Fitzgibbon was the young drummer recruited specifically to play an integral part in the show's success. Here, for the first time, Martin gives his unique insight into how the show and its participants became an overnight success and created a cultural phenomenon which fifty years on still reverberates around the world.But there was a life before and after "Rocky" too, which although not straightforward, was overwhelmingly one of fun, laughter and surprises.Behind The Curtain is a tale of contrasting worlds. Of optimism and resilience when dealing with the challenges of life. The authors intention is to take you into that world and leave you with a smile.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781803816524

    54 min
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3.6
out of 5
43 Ratings

About

The Avid Reader is a podcast for book lovers. Tune in for interviews, recommendations, and insider news from Sam Hankin, host and owner of independent bookstore Wellington Square Bookshop - www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com

Information

  • Creator
    Samuel Hankin
  • Years Active
    2010 - 2024
  • Episodes
    783
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024 Samuel Hankin
  • Show Website
    The Avid Reader Show

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