The Art of Crying: The Healing Power of Tears
Ratings1
Average rating4.5
A vital part of our toolkit right now. Beautifully expressed, thorough, well researched, EMPOWERING, feminist, humanist, sensitive, and mature. Ms. Sandwich has an interesting relationship to crying—she does so more than any person I've ever met or heard of—and has used this superpower for good, by learning about it and sharing her findings. She looks at crying from so many perspectives: evolutionary, cultural, anthropological; across the world and over historical time. All the arts: literature, music, visual, even (swoon!) kintsugi. The book is not only readable and entertaining, it's hella informative and possibly even useful as reference: I'm debating buying my own copy (this one is Library). [UPDATE: I ordered myself a copy]
Am slightly irked that she inserts occasional "telepathy" and "Aquarius" bullshit, because otherwise this is solidly science-based. No fine-detail citation notes (another minor irk) but a respectable two pages of sources. Unfortunately (another irk) the sources are long URLs printed in Comic Sans so my OCR won't grok them, and the list is not available online anywhere I can find. Since this is not a peer-reviewed scholarly publication, I won't dock points, just kvetch.
Personal note, of interest to probably zero people other than me: a remarkable number of independent serendipities came together within a very short time span to inspire me to read this book. The catalyst that primed me was this sentence: "It is also the right hemisphere that is responsible for the peculiarly human ability to express sadness through tears." Just one throwaway sentence in the oh-so-dense [book:The Master and His Emissary] which I've been slowly reading the past month, but a sentence that—like so many other sentences in this book!—made me stop and wonder: is that really a uniquely human ability? Ms. Sandwich addresses that within the first TEN PAGES, impressing the hell out of me. Next factor was seeing friend J. mark this as to-read on GR. Next, the death of someone I cared about. And two more that are not mine to share. These coincidences are not the meddling of some stupid sky-god, they're simply the random workings of a wonderfully chaotic Universe, which IMO makes them even more worthy of deep awe and wonder.
Personal note 2: her music playlist did nothing for me, but Leontyne Price's rendition of Libera me from Verdi's Requiem never, ever fails to dampen my eyes.
A vital part of our toolkit right now. Beautifully expressed, thorough, well researched, EMPOWERING, feminist, humanist, sensitive, and mature. Ms. Sandwich has an interesting relationship to crying—she does so more than any person I've ever met or heard of—and has used this superpower for good, by learning about it and sharing her findings. She looks at crying from so many perspectives: evolutionary, cultural, anthropological; across the world and over historical time. All the arts: literature, music, visual, even (swoon!) kintsugi. The book is not only readable and entertaining, it's hella informative and possibly even useful as reference: I'm debating buying my own copy (this one is Library). [UPDATE: I ordered myself a copy]
Am slightly irked that she inserts occasional "telepathy" and "Aquarius" bullshit, because otherwise this is solidly science-based. No fine-detail citation notes (another minor irk) but a respectable two pages of sources. Unfortunately (another irk) the sources are long URLs printed in Comic Sans so my OCR won't grok them, and the list is not available online anywhere I can find. Since this is not a peer-reviewed scholarly publication, I won't dock points, just kvetch.
Personal note, of interest to probably zero people other than me: a remarkable number of independent serendipities came together within a very short time span to inspire me to read this book. The catalyst that primed me was this sentence: "It is also the right hemisphere that is responsible for the peculiarly human ability to express sadness through tears." Just one throwaway sentence in the oh-so-dense [book:The Master and His Emissary] which I've been slowly reading the past month, but a sentence that—like so many other sentences in this book!—made me stop and wonder: is that really a uniquely human ability? Ms. Sandwich addresses that within the first TEN PAGES, impressing the hell out of me. Next factor was seeing friend J. mark this as to-read on GR. Next, the death of someone I cared about. And two more that are not mine to share. These coincidences are not the meddling of some stupid sky-god, they're simply the random workings of a wonderfully chaotic Universe, which IMO makes them even more worthy of deep awe and wonder.
Personal note 2: her music playlist did nothing for me, but Leontyne Price's rendition of Libera me from Verdi's Requiem never, ever fails to dampen my eyes.