Book Box: Mind matters
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SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at fiction and non-fiction books on the theme of mental health. Buy the books at Amazon
In Trump’s racist America, The Joy Luck Club’s Amy Tan turns to backyard birding for peace
Chinese-American novelist Amy Tan, best known for The Joy Luck Club (1989), has published a book of observations and sketches titled The Backyard Bird Chronicles (2024).
PHOTOS: AMYTANWRITER/INSTAGRAM, ALFRED A. KNOPF
Chinese-American novelist Amy Tan used to be terrified of birds because of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. The Birds (1963), with its menacing swarm of murderous black avians, was filmed only about 30km from the author’s California home.
But The Joy Luck Club (1989) author began to sing a different tune when politics went awry in the United States. With the election of far-right populist Donald Trump as president, anti-Asian racism reached a fever pitch.
Tan, like many Americans, felt helpless and wanted to retreat. She turned to birding in her backyard and started nature journal classes.
“I was thinking: Don’t fall into depression. Depression is being helpless, you need to find some place where you can recover. I decided to go into nature and do something that was about beauty, not something ugly like hatred or racism.”
‘A lot of nonsense being spouted’: Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan on the anti-ageing industry
In his new book, British-American scientist Venki Ramakrishnan is merciless in his debunking of such “crackpot” promises like cryogenics.
PHOTO: KATE JOYCE
Midway through the interview with 2009 Nobel Prize winner Venki Ramakrishnan, the structural biologist unexpectedly initiates a reference to Singapore.
“It strikes me as a slightly impatient country,” he says. “It wants to invest in research and then it wants returns right away. Science doesn’t always work that way. You need patience and a long-term view.”
This exhortation for time for the scientific community to do its best work has led the 72-year-old British-American scientist to write his new book, Why We Die: The New Science Of Ageing And The Quest For Immortality.
The former president of the Royal Society’s expert voice is an “objective look” at the hype surrounding newfangled attempts to stave off death.
Irish author Marian Keyes explores a multitude of women’s issues through writing
During an intense four-year depressive episode from 2008 to 2012, Marian Keyes’ biggest struggle was with suicidal thoughts.
PHOTO: DEAN CHALKLEY
It was through writing that Irish author Marian Keyes, 60, was finally able to express her own tumultuous battle with mental health.
During an intense four-year depressive episode from 2008 to 2012, Keyes’ biggest struggle was with suicidal thoughts. In the same period, she wrote her 13th novel The Mystery Of Mercy Close (2012), featuring Helen Walsh, a female private investigator who also struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts.
Over a Zoom call from her home in Dublin, Ireland, Keyes says: “I did find it therapeutic-ish. I was tired of trying to explain the weirdness of how I felt, and I couldn’t find any other people who felt like I did, though subsequently I have.
“I’ve spent time in a psychiatric hospital and even then, it wasn’t so much the depression that people didn’t get as it was the fear.”
Book review: Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is an energetic, maximalist triumph
Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar's debut novel Martyr! tackles grand themes of addiction, alcoholism, art-making, existentialism and love.
PHOTOS: BEOWULF SHEEHAN, PICADOR
At 28, former alcoholic Cyrus Shams’ new life of sobriety is still a cocktail of insomnia and suicidal thoughts. The orphaned Iranian-American poet stares into the abyss, but he does not want to “waste his one good death”.
He is a wannabe martyr – if that word is not too cliched for an Iranian and too incendiary in an Islamophobic world. He wrestles with his fixation on martyrdom by starting to write a book on historical martyrs such as the Indian anti-colonial revolutionary Bhagat Singh and Chinese poet-aristocrat Qu Yuan.
Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar, who has written openly about his old alcohol addiction and depression, might have written a protagonist that hews close to his biography. But this brilliant debut novel is not a memoir disguised as fiction – it is a resoundingly contemporary novel of great invention and ideas.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers May 25
PHOTOS: HACHETTE UK, LANDMARK BOOKS, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Enigmas by former NMP Simon Tay hits the No. 1 spot on the non-fiction bestsellers list.
