26 Books Like Father Time

This book resonated deeply with me, and I enjoyed every word. Isabel beautifully bridges East and West by comparing two cultures. Thank you for sharing your incredible work with the world.

I enjoy novels that take on universal themes with compelling stories and unforgettable characters. Mr. Jimmy from Around the Way takes us on a journey of a powerful man’s fall from grace and his search for redemption. Frustrated by wounded love in a marriage he thought was perfect, black billionaire James Henry Ferguson commits an act that threatens to destroy all he holds dear. His search takes him away from his rich, comfortable life in Washington, D.C., to an impoverished, racially segregated rural community in Mississippi. There he sinks in depression over what he has lost and whether he can regain his self-esteem and redeem his soul. In the process of getting to know the people living in his community, which is called “around the way," he discovers there is much he can do through philanthropy to improve their living conditions and help them realize their own self worth. Blount’s… show more.

Shep Siegel conducted ingenious experiments in the 1970s demonstrating that drug tolerance in rats is largely if not entirely due to Pavlovian conditioning: The experienced drug user responds to indicators that a dose is imminent with physiological counter-responses that lessen the impact of the drug. Almost from the get-go, Siegel saw the potential relevance of his research to aspects of addiction, withdrawal, and relapse in human beings, but it has taken addiction researchers decades to assimilate the implications, which are profound.
Now retired, Siegel has written a highly readable retrospective account of this story which I found utterly convincing, and it should turn on light-switches in the head of anyone who has ever dealt with addiction, whether mild or severe, in one's self or in a family member or friend.

Daniel Nettle is a rare social scientist: he writes beautifully and exceptionally clearly, and he is a fine interdisciplinary scholar who treats his predecessors with all the respect that they deserve (and no more).
In this book, published in 2015, he summarized years of multi-methods research by himself and several collaborators bearing on the questions of how and why the social lives and attitudes of people in an affluent versus a deprived neighbourhood in the same city (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) are vastly different. Every reader will have intuitions about these issues and some of those intuitions will be borne out. But there is no-one who wouldn't learn a great deal from this book, and Nettle does not shy away from asking whether there are practical policy implications of his findings. Social research at its best!

Mother Nature completely changed the way I think about motherhood. As a mother of 4 kids, I am consumed both by my maternal responsibilities and with guilt for not meeting those responsibilities perfectly.

In this paradigm-shifting book, Hrdy takes her readers on a journey through human history and the animal world to reveal a different view of motherhood than the one mothers are conditioned to have—that mothers should sacrifice everything for their children.

Hrdy uses evolutionary theory, experimental evidence, and examples from nature to show how mammalian and primate mothers evolved to skillfully deal with the competing demands of survival and motherhood. Our bodies and brains are exquisitely built to balance our own needs with those of our children.

Given my interests in nature and nurture, what I find especially fascinating is “the nature of nurture”. By this I mean how Darwinian natural selection has shaped the way our species rears its children and the effects such care has on them.

This book by a world-famous anthropologist beautifully, informative, and insightfully reveals how evolution has made us who we are as parents, people capable of unconditional love but by no means always dispensing it, sometimes the exact opposite—and why that is the case.

I am an academic economist (retired) whose career always has had a strong interdisciplinary orientation. Among other fields, I have long been interested in psychology, especially social psychology, but also been skeptical of the tendency among its practitioners to use convenience samples of handy crowds of U.S. (or otherwise "western") undergraduate students to draw grand conclusions about human behavior. Prof. Henrich, a cultural anthropologist (and aerospace engineer!), shares this skepticism. In particular, he presents in this book theory and evidence of how WEIRD people in the Western world are relative to the majority of peoples elsewhere. (WEIRD = people in western, educated, industrialized, rich, developed countries.) This matches my own experiences across the world, and so I was curious to read this book. Culture, Prof. Henrich writes, influences brain development and results in persistent ways of seeing the world, and vice versa. Culture and psychological form and reform each other… show more.

Alison Gopnik is a towering figure in the field of developmental psychology, and interviewing her at her Berkeley lab was one of the highlights of my reporting for my own book. She tackles parenting from a particularly erudite and academic angle, pulling on psychology, evolutionary biology, and more to persuade parents that parenting is, in fact—and in her words—“a mug’s game.” We may think we are carpenters, building a perfect specimen of child, but in fact the best way to raise resilient, successful kids is to act like a gardener, providing the right environment in which they can thrive. I found it to be a particularly calming message, and one that will resonate with anyone who agonizes over minute decisions. 

This enjoyable, first-person romp about raising kids in France is a must-read for any francophile. Druckerman is an American who married a Brit, and they relocated to Paris, where they had three children. With a reporter’s eye, Druckerman tackles such questions as, how on earth do French parents have their kids sleeping through the night at a few weeks old, and how is it that French children sit down to civilized three-course meals when they aren’t yet three feet tall? 

This is the Mother of all boy mom books. It’s required reading for anyone learning to speak boy. Equal parts despair—Lamott is a single mom who sometimes wants to leave her crying boy outside on the stoop—and equal parts gut punches of hilarious wisdom and ardor about boy life and mom devotion.