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Strangers to Ourselves
- Author
- Rachel Aviv
- Narrator
- Andi Arndt
- Publisher
- Random House
- Publish Date
- 20 October 2022
- Run Time
- 7 hours 40 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
- Genre
- Popular psychology, Coping with / advice about mental health issues or topics, Psychiatric and mental disorders, Health, illness or addiction: social aspects, Psychology: the self, ego, identity, personality, Reportage, journalism or collected columns, Personality traits / Personality types, Coping with / advice about stress and stress-related issues or topics
- Rating
- 5.0 (1 review)
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What to expect
Brouhgt to you by Penguin.
The highly anticipated debut from the award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv is a ground-breaking exploration of illness and the mind
Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and riveting look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on unpublished journals and letters, along with deep reporting, it follows people who feel as if they have reached the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Their diagnosis, while giving their experiences a name, also shapes their sense of what their future may look like-and their identities, too.
Rachel Aviv is known for her radical empathy: she excels at seeing the world through the eyes of her fellow human beings. Writing first about her own experience of being on an anorexia ward at the age of six, she introduces, among others, a fiercely intelligent mother recovering from incarceration and psychosis; a woman who lives in healing temples in Kerala, where she is celebrated as a saint; and a young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to stop her medication because she doesn't know who she is without it.
Through startling connections, intimate testimonies, and diverse social and cultural perspectives, Aviv opens up fresh ways of thinking about illness and the mind, in a book which is curious, transformative, and above all, deeply human.
© Rachel Aviv 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
Critics Review
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A subtle and penetrating investigation into how mental illness is diagnosed ... Aviv is an instinctive storyteller... meticulous, empathic, tirelessly inquisitive.
Observer
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So attuned to subtlety and complexity... a book-length demonstration of Aviv's extraordinary ability to hold space for the "uncertainty, mysteries and doubt" of others.
New York Times Book Review
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Profoundly intelligent ... superbly written portraits ... [A] remarkable book.
Guardian
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Captures with subtlety and empathy the honest reality of mental illness... a human chronicle that is intimate and unpredictable... Instead of demonizing disorders of the mind, Aviv seeks to understand their causes.
The Times
See more reviews See fewer reviews
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An incredibly researched, empathetic, and moving book.
Lit Hub
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Combines the poise of Janet Malcolm and the confessional bravery of Joan Didion ... Through half a dozen vivid case studies - one being the story of her own hospitalization at age six - Aviv unravels medical diagnoses and demonstrates how societal narratives around illness take hold. The result is fascinating and empathetic.
Vogue
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Aviv applies her signature conscientiousness and probing intellect to every section of this eye-opening book ... A moving, meticulously researched, elegantly constructed work of nonfiction.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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In writing against the limits of psychiatric narratives, into the space where language has failed, Aviv paradoxically finds language for the most ineffable registers of human experience.
Wall Street Journal
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Writing with uncanny empathy and integrity ... Strangers to Ourselves is a work of landmark reporting that is truly heartbreaking and astonishing.
Cathy Park Hong, author of MINOR FEELINGS: An Asian American Reckoning
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A groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting exploration of the relationship between diagnosis and identity. This is the kind of book that can make your life flash before your eyes, glittering with new insights and a sense of unguessed possibilities.
Elif Batuman, author of EITHER/OR and THE IDIOT
User Reviews
Book 5.0
Narration 5.0
-
5.0 5.0
An incredible book full of complex stories, that are told with the gentleness you'd hope your own story would be told.
Franki 2022-12-26
Details
- Author
- Rachel Aviv
- Narrator
- Andi Arndt
- Duration
- 7 hours 40 minutes
- Release Date
- 20 October 2022
- ISBN
- 9781529194876
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Random House
- Genre
- Popular psychology, Coping with / advice about mental health issues or topics, Psychiatric and mental disorders, Health, illness or addiction: social aspects, Psychology: the self, ego, identity, personality, Reportage, journalism or collected columns, Personality traits / Personality types, Coping with / advice about stress and stress-related issues or topics
- Rating
- 5.0(1 review)
- Narration
- 5.0(1 review)
Synopsis
Brouhgt to you by Penguin.The highly anticipated debut from the award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv is a ground-breaking exploration of illness and the mindStrangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and riveting look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on unpublished journals and letters, along with deep reporting, it follows people who feel as if they have reached the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Their diagnosis, while giving their experiences a name, also shapes their sense of what their future may look like-and their identities, too.Rachel Aviv is known for her radical empathy: she excels at seeing the world through the eyes of her fellow human beings. Writing first about her own experience of being on an anorexia ward at the age of six, she introduces, among others, a fiercely intelligent mother recovering from incarceration and psychosis; a woman who lives in healing temples in Kerala, where she is celebrated as a saint; and a young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to stop her medication because she doesn't know who she is without it.Through startling connections, intimate testimonies, and diverse social and cultural perspectives, Aviv opens up fresh ways of thinking about illness and the mind, in a book which is curious, transformative, and above all, deeply human.© Rachel Aviv 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
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