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Reviews of Us by David Nicholls

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by David Nicholls

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• Romance/Love Stories
• Contemporary
• Parenting & Families
• Mid-Life Onwards

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About this Book

Book summary.

A compellingly human, deftly funny new novel about what holds marriages and families together—and what happens, and what we learn about ourselves, when everything threatens to fall apart.

Douglas Petersen may be mild-mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that, against all odds, seduces beautiful Connie into a second date . . . and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades after their relationship first blossomed in London, they live more or less happily in the suburbs with their moody seventeen year-old son, Albie. Then Connie tells him she thinks she wants a divorce. The timing couldn't be worse. Hoping to encourage her son's artistic interests, Connie has planned a month-long tour of European capitals, a chance to experience the world's greatest works of art as a family, and she can't bring herself to cancel. And maybe going ahead with the original plan is for the best anyway? Douglas is privately convinced that this landmark trip will rekindle the romance in the marriage, and might even help him to bond with Albie. Narrated from Douglas's endearingly honest, slyly witty, and at times achingly optimistic point of view, Us is the story of a man trying to rescue his relationship with the woman he loves, and learning how to get closer to a son who's always felt like a stranger. Us is a moving meditation on the demands of marriage and parenthood, the regrets of abandoning youth for middle age, and the intricate relationship between the heart and the head. And in David Nicholls's gifted hands, Douglas's odyssey brings Europe—from the streets of Amsterdam to the famed museums of Paris, from the cafés of Venice to the beaches of Barcelona—to vivid life just as he experiences a powerful awakening of his own. Will this summer be his last as a husband, or the moment when he turns his marriage, and maybe even his whole life, around?

1. the burglars

Last summer, a short time before my son was due to leave home for college, my wife woke me in the middle of the night. At first I thought she was shaking me because of burglars. Since moving to the country my wife had developed a tendency to jerk awake at every creak and groan and rustle. I'd try to reassure her. It's the radiators, I'd say; it's the joists contracting or expanding; it's foxes. Yes, foxes taking the laptop, she'd say, foxes taking the keys to the car, and we'd lie and listen some more. There was always the 'panic button' by the side of our bed, but I could never imagine pressing it in case the alarm disturbed someone – say, a burglar for instance. I am not a particularly courageous man, not physically imposing, but on this particular night I noted the time – a little after four – sighed, yawned and went downstairs. I stepped ...

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Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Us is a pleasurable read with short, comic chapters that also treads on satisfying emotional territory. It's possible to be cynical about reading a book that is expected to be a big commercial juggernaut, or a gateway to something bigger and more lucrative (the film) – but seeing Us through that lens would underestimate a book that is, as it should be, more than a pre-screenplay "treatment." There is emotional truth and subtlety here, in Douglas Petersen's view of the world, that will never make it to the big screen... continued

Full Review (671 words) This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today .

(Reviewed by Jennifer G Wilder ).

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Beyond the Book

The grand tour.

In David Nicholls' novel, Us , a couple sets out to show their son Europe as a parting gift before he heads to college. It's to be a Grand Tour, the mother tells her son, "to prepare you for the adult world, like in the eighteenth century." She explains that it was "traditional for young men of a certain class and age to embark on a cultural pilgrimage to the continent...taking in certain ancient sites and works of art before returning to Britain as sophisticated, civilized men of experience. In practice the culture was largely an excuse for drinking and whoring and getting ripped off." The son is skeptical about this project. "So why don't I just go to Ibiza?" he asks. The idea of "The Grand Tour" is at least as old as the seventeenth ...

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Read-Alikes

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A coming-of-age novel—a heady union of Before Sunrise and Beautiful Ruins —about a father and his teenage son who are forced to spend two sleepless nights exploring the city of Marseilles, a journey of unexpected adventure and profound discovery that helps them come to truly know each other.

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5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

“the novel draws on a long tradition of mystical writing that confuses sacred and secular desire.”.

Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Garth Greenwell on Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples , Alex Preston on Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 , Blair Braverman on Kevin Fedarko’s A Walk in the Park , Chris Klimek on Steven Hyden’s  There Was Nothing You Could Do , and Grace Byron on Griffin Hansbury’s Some Strange Music Draws Me In .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

“Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples  opens with the most remarkable account of cruising I know. By cruising I mean a specifically gay male practice of organized promiscuity, a form of sexual sociality at once universal—existing, in remarkably similar forms, in rural American truck stops and among Roman ruins—and, as White chronicles it, specific to a particular time and place, the Chelsea piers in nineteen-seventies New York, part of the extravagant, unprecedented gay world that flourished between the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the onset of the aids crisis. In the nighttime scene that opens the book, men brush past each other in the dark, alert in their animal bodies, their senses sharpened by hunger; they send up cigarette flares, displaying themselves against the night sky; they pair off or remain solitary, unchosen—like the narrator, who lingers until sunrise, when finally he finds a man to go home with …

The novel draws on a long tradition of mystical writing that confuses sacred and secular desire, using the language of sexual pleasure to denote spiritual rapture. If nothing else, especially in the context of 1978, this constitutes a remarkable statement about queer lives: that they are possessed of a dignity and significance that can be adequately described only by the resources of the devotional tradition … Far from the heroic queers that populate much post-Stonewall cultural production, the narrator of Nocturnes is melancholic, diffuse, too wan for political action, ‘less a man in time,’ as he says of another character, ‘than a synchronous field of energy’ … White’s novel is best understood, I think, as adhering to an alternative, anti-identitarian queer tradition that has never been wholly congenial to North American readers … It is not merely a historic record, or an essential document of a crucial career, but a psychological study of complexity and depth, and a stylistic performance of an immaculacy seldom achieved.”

–Garth Greenwell on Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples   ( The New Yorker )

“From the very first sentence of Richard Flanagan’s 12th book, Question 7 , the model for this extraordinary, hybrid work is clear. WG Sebald is there in the subject matter: the second world war and the ethics of mass bombing campaigns; the interweaving of personal and political history; the blending of truth, memory and a kind of hyper-real imagined past. Sebald is there in the deeper currents: a somewhat solitary, occasionally ridiculous middle-aged man seeking to come to terms with his place in the world, wrestling in particular with his complex love for a father whose own life was defined by his experiences in the war. It’s there even in the rhythms of the prose. The book begins like a Sebald tribute act, with its stateliness, its subclauses, its melancholy … the story of Flanagan’s attempts to understand his parents, both of whom have recently died, and through them the strange contingency of his own life …

There’s so much more in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir. There’s the genocide of Tasmania’s Indigenous peoples (and a series of links to HG Wells); there’s the author’s meeting with one of the prison guards who tortured his father; there’s a section at the end in which Flanagan describes his own brush with the capriciousness of existence: an almost fatal kayak accident that reads like 127 Hours . This book already comes laden with praise from its Australian publication–Peter Carey said it ‘may just be the most significant piece of Australian art in the last 100 years.’ That it is a masterpiece is without question. Sebald himself would have been proud of the subtlety, the depth, the intensity of thought and feeling.”

–Alex Preston on Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 ( The Guardian )

“Maybe it’s when he’s extracting drinking water from damp sand with a syringe, trying desperately not to die from dehydration, but there came a point in A Walk in the Park , Kevin Fedarko’s memoir about walking the length of the Grand Canyon, that I thought: Wow, this hike is a terrible idea … He uprooted his life to volunteer for a tour company, handling raw sewage on rafting expeditions in the hope of one day being promoted to the driver’s seat of a dory. As he relates one grievous mishap after another, the reader faces a dawning realization. Wait: Is this guy going to walk the whole canyon because he’s not good enough to row a boat? Indeed—and outdoor literature is the better for it, because A Walk in the Park is a triumph. Fedarko doesn’t describe awe; he induces it, with page-turning action, startling insights and the kind of verbal grace that makes multipage descriptions of, say, a flock of pelicans feel riveting and new …

The book never shies from its paradoxes: I did this so you don’t have to; I did this because you shouldn’t; I shouldn’t have done this, but it’s good I did. By the time the men complete their yearlong hike, they’ve endured and overcome so much that they’re briefly mistaken for plane crash victims. But in truth, they, and we, are pilgrims on holy ground. Readers will be tempted to visit the canyon just to keep the book’s spell alive longer—and to feel Fedarko’s company in their awe.”

–Blair Braverman on Kevin Fedarko’s A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon ( The New York Times Book Review )

“There’s a reason ‘Bruce Springsteen’ is still a viable Halloween costume in 2024, and that reason is Born in the U.S.A. … The Boss’s red-bandanna-and-sleeveless-flannel-shirt phase was only a blip within a performing career that has now spanned more than half a century. More than a dozen Springsteen albums have been packaged behind portraits of his invariably careworn mug; only Born in the U.S.A. came swaddled in an Annie Leibovitz close-up of the denim-clad Boss-terior. But it was this synthesizer-heavy era that made Springsteen a permanent celebrity beyond the sphere of music fandom—and made it possible for the 74-year-old to continue filling stadiums even now, despite how profoundly the America beyond them has changed.

The disappearance of that metaphorical breadbasket, wherein the workaholic Springsteen briefly became an unlikely figure of national consensus, is the subject of ride-or-die Springsteen fan Steven Hyden’s new book … Hyden is an imaginative cultural omnivore, which means his critical examination occasionally takes the form of something like fan fiction … Your appetite for these kinds of fanboy thought experiments is a reliable gauge of whether this book is for you. If Springsteen’s red-headband, swole-arms incarnation is the only one you’d recognize at a costume party, it might not be. But if the sight of a bejeweled, haunted-looking man with slicked-back hair and a goatee makes your brain say, ‘ Tom Joad -era Bruce,’ it definitely is.”

–Chris Klimek on Steven Hyden’s  There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ and the End of the Heartland ( The Washington Post )

“Through this intimate examination of desire and destruction, Hansbury builds a careful tale of growing up in an age when mystery was the defining characteristic of the trans experience, opening up the untidiness of trans identity and the fractures that occur when navigating a world without mentors or father figures. Hansbury doesn’t attempt to offer a neat tale of representation or trauma, but instead digs into one particular trans man’s embodied experience and struggle to contextualize his childhood and unsatisfying adulthood. Through Mel and Max, Hansbury is able to explore trans identity at a curious slant, offering a story of the trans-masculine experience that evokes the dangers of a boyhood lived in the shadow of girlhood. If girlhood is about reckoning with a lack of bodily autonomy in Hanbsury’s novel, masculinity is about unfettered anger …

This is a curious formulation of identity, one that few novelists have dared to explore: the mirroring possibilities of trans men and women and our relationships and responsibilities to one another … By alternating between girlhood and manhood, Hansbury explores the jaggedness of identity and the lack of easy gendered delineations. This allows the reader a way into understanding Max’s bitterness at being read as only a man, or as someone incapable of perpetuating misogyny … Imperfect as he is, Max grows up by the end of this novel, becoming the mentor he so desperately craved as a child. Through him, Hansbury has created a character all too rare in the world of contemporary literary fiction: a man who is able to extend compassion across generations. His life, then, is more than a tense and moving story—it is also a puzzle formed by the spikiness of identity.”

–Grace Byron on Griffin Hansbury’s Some Strange Music Draws Me In ( The Nation )

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Book Reviews

In 'the less people know about us' a mysterious identity theft hits close to home.

Genevieve Valentine

The Less People Know About Us

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When Axton Betz was 12, her father stopped getting his issues of The Brayer.

She and her parents lived on an Indiana farm, distant from almost everything; her mother's passion was the home shopping network, and her father's passion was raising donkeys. Those magazines were his professional favorite. Axton pointed out that her pen-pal letters had also gone astray, and the family agreed how strange it was that someone would take that kind of thing.

But someone had definitely taken them. And for the next 20 years, they didn't stop.

Sometimes, the things that most influenced someone's childhood are shrouded in mystery, leaving us to wonder for awhile. Other times, their book-cover bio mentions a "PhD in human development and family studies, focusing on child identity theft and elder financial exploitation perpetrated by family members," and removes all doubt.

T he Less People Know About Us : A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity is a memoir by way of a true-crime story. For Axton Betz-Hamilton, this identity theft her family experienced when she was a child reshaped her personality, her relationships, and the way she experienced the world — a theft from which she never really recovered.

There's a strange narrative tension in a true-crime story being told by someone who experienced the crime. (When discussing identity-theft laws, Betz-Hamilton talks about her ambivalence about the term "victim" — it codifies that a crime has been committed, but does so with a label that sounds powerless.) We understand immediately that such stories aren't here to reconstruct the crime so much as they are to take you through the visceral experience of the crime itself.

Betz-Hamilton dutifully lays out just how damaging it was. Their phone got cut off, which isolated them even further in a small town where neighbors were few and far between. Never very popular in school ("I was a bully's dream," she notes), it hardly seemed strange to avoid making friends. It made sense, when money was so tight, to try to get by without meals. It made sense to keep the curtains closed, and never to answer the door. And given the troubled family history she lays out, it only made sense for them to distance themselves. After all, who could be trusted?

The trauma casts such a long shadow that things which might preoccupy another memoir are only footnotes here. (Her high-pressure Baptist private school hardly registers against the increasingly high-stakes game playing out at home.) Betz-Hamilton details the hard work of trying to move on, even when the criminals follow you everywhere from credit score to social habits. But things at home never got better — her parents were "never quite able to regain the control of their lives that had disappeared with the donkey magazines."

Betz-Hamilton deliberately focused her studies on identity theft, becoming an expert in a burgeoning subject, always with the hope that one day she'd find out who had managed to so wholly destabilize her family. When she finally discovers the culprit, it turns out to be only the beginning of a long, painful process to assemble all the pieces of her past.

It's a briskly-written book; the air of menace is palpable — and occasionally so effective that Betz-Hamilton seems to recede from her own narrative, bursts of visceral motion overshadowed by long periods of passive action narrated through a fog of dread. But then again, that's part of the point; how do you — how can you — put aside something that followed you for so many years? The mystery of that childhood identity theft — interwoven with her understated coming-of-age and some family truths — is a deeply compelling story of a crime that hit close to home.

Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.

• identity theft
• the less people know about us
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The Truth Is Always Good: A Tale of Two Books

Review: ‘the truth about us’ by brant hansen.

More By Benjamin Vrbicek

I had only been a pastor at our church for a month or two, and so far I hadn’t preached anything provocative. As a new teaching pastor, I thought it best to lay down some solid sermons before saying anything spicy; the congregation and I were still getting to know each other.

But then we began a series in the book of Proverbs, and I was assigned the sermon on sex.

That Sunday morning was a bumpy start. When I arrived at church, I awkwardly went over the Scripture slides with a young woman volunteering to run the computer, passages from Proverbs 5–7 about “breasts” and “intoxication.”

The clicker looked like she was 10 years old because she was. As if I weren’t already uncomfortable, when the music team started its first song, my new neighbor walked into the back of the church and moved to the front. I’d shared the gospel with him days earlier, and he was visiting our church for the first time with his girlfriend. They lived together, and now they had a front-row seat to a sermon on sex.

A few days later, as we discussed the sermon, our other teaching pastor told me I preached nothing wrong—it was, in a sense, all true. The problem, he said, was my timidity about the truth, even an embarrassment that conveyed to the congregation that while God’s Word might be true, it’s not good for us.

The Truth about Us: The Very Good News about How Very Bad We Are

Brant hansen.

“I’m not a good person.”

Seriously, who says that? Practically everyone, from priests to prisoners, thinks of themselves as morally better than average. So why change our minds? What good could possibly come from admitting that most of us are far more self -righteous than righteous?

In this book, Brant Hansen makes an entertaining and insightful case that we can find great freedom in admitting we’re not so wonderful after all. It can help us improve relationships, be better thinkers and listeners, and even make us more fun to be around.

In his conversational, fun-to-read, and delightfully self-effacing style, Hansen draws from biblical insight and the work of everyone from esteemed social psychologists to comedians to show that the sooner we get over ourselves and admit the truth, the sooner we’re free to live a more lighthearted, fruitful, fun-loving life. Because the humble life is truly your best one.

Two Books About Our Humanity

Last spring, major publishers released two books in the same week. Both authors covered similar ground, but from different convictions. The topic, broadly speaking, was anthropology: who we are as humans—and why understanding our humanity matters. One author took a biblical view and the other, by and large, did not. Both books still seem to be selling well.

The first is Brant Hansen’s The Truth About Us: The Very Good News About How Very Bad We Are . The second is Mike McHargue’s You’re a Miracle (and a Pain in the —): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Make You You .

The authors have a lot in common, including their winsome, humorous speaking styles, whether by radio or podcast. The books also share common ground. But as the subtitles suggest, their roads diverge. Hansen’s book understands the gospel of Jesus as good news for our badness; McHargue sees our acceptance of ourselves (and others) as the good news.

Here’s a closer look at each of their arguments.

Diverging Roads

Hansen—a nationally syndicated radio host and advocate for healing children with correctible disabilities through CURE International—opens The Truth About Us with a “Dear Everyone” letter that simply says, “We all have a serious problem: All of us think we’re good people. But Jesus says we’re not. Sincerely, Brant P. Hansen / PS: The rest of the book is the PS.”

And the rest of the book is that postscript, 200 pages exploring what Jesus says about our depravity and the Savior’s love for real, not theoretical, sinners. In classic Hansen style, self-deprecating stories abound. But he also treads serious terrain.

“Repentance is rare and revolutionary and arduous and counter to our every instinct,” he writes, because it requires “reversing all the psychological machinery” that wants to blame others. “But if we don’t repent, we never get to feel the pure joy of forgiveness” (126).

In other words, walking through the door of truth requires the humility to acknowledge our badness. But this is the only way we come to know God, the meaning of the cross, and our heavenly adoption.

Humility is the only way we come to know God, the meaning of the cross, and our heavenly adoption.

McHargue—host of  Ask Science Mike and cohost of  The Liturgists —fills You’re a Miracle with fascinating scientific discussion, especially about how the human brain operates. But the book is more than facts and figures. McHargue is a gifted storyteller who pulls readers in with his engaging and transparent prose, even telling us of his attempted suicide as a teenager.

As with his first book,  Finding God in the Waves , McHargue refuses to adopt the tone of an angry ex-evangelical, someone too jaded to appreciate aspects of the tradition he now rejects.

We can begin to see the difference between Hansen’s good news and McHargue’s in this extended passage in McHargue’s first chapter:

If I plumb the depths of what science reveals about my mind and body, it can lead me to a place of remarkable peace with myself. . . . This is a book about you learning that you are a miracle too. I want to start you on a journey that ends with you looking in the mirror one day, unable to hold back tears, because instead of seeing someone who isn’t tall, thin, young, or attractive enough, you instead see a profound and rare being who is worthy of love . I want you to see yourself and be awed, because you are truly awesome. (18, emphasis added)

Christians could affirm much of this passage. God pronounced his creation “good,” and the heavens declare his glory, and yet it was only after God made male and female in his image that God called creation “very good.” Thus humans are indeed, in McHargue’s words, a miracle.

Yet McHargue’s emphasis on human worthiness encapsulates the difference between the two books. The former possesses the true gospel of acceptance by God through the work of Christ, while the latter rejects orthodoxy for the gospel of self-acceptance. It isn’t surprising that McHargue says near the end of the book, “I am a Christian. But I am the kind whom most American Christians wouldn’t call a Christian” (177).

Knowing Our Badness Is Good for Us

Our hearts want a gospel of self-acceptance, and we’ll buy books that proclaim it. But as Jesus told the Pharisees, he came to call not those who see themselves as healthy and righteous, but those who know their sickness and sin (Mark 2:17).

Progressive Christianity would love to identify evangelicals with the Pharisees in the Bible because of our supposed fastidious attention to jots and tittles, but—at least in this way of calling the sick healthy—it is progressive Christianity that shares the family likeness.

As J. Gresham Machen wrote 100 years ago, “Without the conviction of sin there can be no appreciation of the uniqueness of Jesus . . . [and] without the conviction of sin, the good news of redemption seems to be an idle tale” ( Christianity and Liberalism , 105–6). Meanwhile, the real gospel allows us to stand in front of the mirror unable to hold back tears, because instead of seeing someone who isn’t tall, thin, young, or attractive enough, we know God’s love has drowned all our unworthiness in an ocean of grace.

Jesus came to call not those who see themselves as healthy and righteous, but those who know their sickness and sin.

We talk of teachable moments with children; that Sunday I preached on sex, as a new pastor to a new congregation, taught me more in one sermon than a year of preaching. We happened to have a church picnic that afternoon, and I confessed to a mature Christian some reasons why I felt so timid about the truth. He looked at me and said something I’ve not forgotten: “Just remember, the truth is always positive.”

In a day when the truth that sinners need a Savior can feel antiquated, as though biblical anthropology were an aspect of the once-for-all gospel to leave behind, Christians might need to double down on the bad news to appreciate the good.

Benjamin Vrbicek (MDiv, Covenant Theological Seminary) is a teaching pastor at Community Evangelical Free Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the managing editor for Gospel-Centered Discipleship . Benjamin and his wife, Brooke, have six children. He is the author of Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World (Fan and Flame, 2020), Struggle Against Porn: 29 Diagnostic Tests for Your Head and Heart (Rainer, 2019), and Don’t Just Send a Resume: How to Find the Right Job in a Local Church (Fan and Flame, 2019). He blogs at Fan and Flame . You can follow him on Twitter .

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Book Review: ‘When the Sea Came Alive’ expands understanding of D-Day invasion

This cover image released by Avid Reader shows “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day” by Garrett M. Graff. (Avid Reader via AP)

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Writing about the Allied invasion of Normandy , Garrett M. Graff is treading onto familiar history with his latest book.

From books by historian Stephen Ambrose to films like Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” there’s ample works chronicling the June 6, 1944, landing during World War II that ultimately led to the downfall of Nazi Germany.

But in “When The Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day,” Graff weaves together hundreds of eyewitness accounts to create a history that stands alongside those works, expanding readers’ understanding of D-Day and offering a new, complete portrait in time for the 80th anniversary commemorations .

The oral history begins with a look at the planning of the operation, going back to 1943, and the buildup of personnel and equipment in the months leading up to the operation.

Graff uses a wide array and diversity of voices that give a fuller picture of the lead-up to the invasion, as well as the fighting itself. The book excels in highlighting the experiences of Black soldiers who landed on D-Day beaches and women who were part of the story, such as correspondent Martha Gellhorn.

But it should come as no surprise that the most harrowing portions of the book remain the landing and the battles that occurred on D-Day itself, with vivid first-hand account. Graff skills at sifting through the accounts and documents propel the action throughout the book.

Graff’s book is a testimony to the value in preserving memories from grand historical events, demonstrating how much can be unearthed from even the most familiar stories.

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Danny Dorling

June 4th, 2024, the road to freedom: economics and the good society – review.

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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

In   The Road to Freedom ,  Joseph Stiglitz   considers the relationship between capitalism and freedom, evaluating democracy, economics and what constitutes a good society. According to  Danny Dorling , the book’s lack of a coherent structure and an outline of what measures could enable a more free and equal society will leave many readers wanting.

Joseph Stiglitz came to LSE in May to speak about the book – watch it back on YouTube .

The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society. Joseph E. Stiglitz. Allen Lane. 2024.

Stiglitz’s argument in The Road to Freedom is that right-wing economists are “almost poisonous”, by which he means that often that his opponents make malicious arguments such as to suggest that poor children have chosen the wrong parents (83). He reiterates his long-held claim (and obvious truism) that, both in the past and today, “markets were, in fact, not efficient; that … in general the economy is inefficient. ” (78-79, emphasis in the original). It is admirable that Stiglitz battles on trying to explain this to those of his readers who have unevidenced faith in “market efficiency”. However, what alternative is he offering them?

It is admirable that Stiglitz battles on trying to explain this to those of his readers who have unevidenced faith in ‘market efficiency’. However, what alternative is he offering them?

The book is mostly about one man’s “lifetime of scholarship” at places including Columbia, Harvard, Yale and Oxford (295-297). It is more that, than a set of new ideas. According to the author, this scholarship extends the work of John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Antonio Gramsci, Thomas Hobbs, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, John Keynes, and John Galbraith (the most mentioned ten, xv-xviii, 22,23, 25, 87, 131). We do learn that his next book, being written now with colleagues, is to be titled The Other Invisible Hand (154). Presumably this will be an elaboration on his previous comments arguing that most people are not as selfish as most economists are.

So why was this book published? The key reason is because of who its author is. Joseph Stiglitz is currently professor of economics and finance at Columbia University. He was the the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, and is the author of many other books, notably Globalization and its Discontents (2002). He was formerly chairman of the council of economic advisers to President Clinton and the chief economist at the World Bank from 1997 to1999; (He left the World Bank after having been outspoken in his criticism of the US’s approach to the Asian financial crisis).

In 2011 Time Magazine ranked Stiglitz among the 100 most influential people in the world, and the (then recently departed from office) British Prime Minster Gordon Brown suggested that he “…got the Asian crisis right, foresaw the bubble that caused such havoc in 2008 and is advocating global answers to a host of problems that can no longer be solved at the local or national level […] his work goes on challenging us all to rethink our ideas, he will always be a controversialist wherever he goes.”

In 2024 ScholarGPS ranked Stiglitz as the world’s most productive social scientist in terms of the “profound impact” (his citations) and the quality (his h-index) of his publications. However, the Scholar GPS ranking does seem a little biased towards the works of white men in the whiter parts of the west, Stiglitz included.

But what are Stiglitz’s priorities as an intellectual today? He explains: “The most important example of a global public good is protecting the world from climate change” (83). Much in the book takes this tone: pronouncements from on high that erase the more pressing concerns of those who live without basic needs being met today, such as safety, shelter and food.

The book lacks a global outlook and substantive depth to its enquiry.

The book lacks a global outlook and substantive depth to its enquiry. There are only a very few references to places other than the US (or to Oxford in England). Stiglitz claims that Finns like paying tax (82), but he does not suggest why. He chastises the French for “…continu[ing] to contribute to global warming unabated” (68) after a tax on diesel use was not implemented; but does not set it in context, for instance, by comparing France’s decarbonisation policy record to that of the US. He suggests that economic growth in China has nothing to do with communism (209) without explaining why. It is hard to imagine China having had such a highly coordinated economy and such determined long-term economic planning without communism.

The book concludes by suggesting that “we can do much better than the current form of capitalism” (277) and that we need a new global economic architecture. As a reader, it is somewhat frustrating to wade through hundreds of pages only to discover that: “This is not the place to delve into what that architecture would fully look like.” (260). Clearly, he is not suggesting that other countries copy China. So, what is Stiglitz advocating, other than a little more kindness and humanity? There are many economies in Europe and elsewhere (such as  Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia,  Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, and Japan) that have, by historic standards, achieved high levels of economic equality which he could have suggested as models for the future of the US; however, perhaps to do so would appear unpatriotic.

The primary purpose of the book, then, remains vague. Stiglitz writes that “we don’t have to answer the question of what every possible good society might look like. We begin where we are. We respect honesty, kindness, other-regardingness, cooperativeness, and empathy. We dislike suffering and deprivations, injustices, and so forth” (213). But the book suffers from not being grounded in a proper examination of at least one different society and its current trajectory or alternative future, and how that currently differs from the US.

There is little new to be learned from this book by economists or students of economics [ … ] a more general audience may gain insight from its analysis of right-wing economists.

There is little new to be learned from this book by economists or students of economics. Compelling insights – such as the fact that in the US, unlike in most countries, resources below land are not owned by the state (109) – are few and far between. That said, a more general audience may gain insight from its analysis of right-wing economists. If intended for general readers, however, its broad-stroke approach is undercut by the book’s lack of a clear and logical structure. Instead, it takes a stream-of-consciousness approach that is difficult to follow and belies the structured approach (of three parts and distinct chapters) indicated in the table of contents. Beyond that, the book’s referencing is severely wanting. it is in several places unconvincing (such as where it just suggests that all that is needed is a little more humanity), vague (see note 17 on page 319) and often self-indulgent (see notes 18, 19 and 20 on 322).

Admittedly, economics appears today to be only just able to begin to take tiny steps out of the mess the discipline is in; at least the kind of economics that still dominates university departments in the US and UK. Students of economics worldwide have rebelled against the orthodox teachings of the old men at the top of the discipline in declining western countries. They have called for more heterodox views to be included in their syllabi. As yet, at least in the most elite of academic institutions, these calls have been largely ignored.

This is not Stigltiz at his finest, and it reflects a hollowness to the so-called international debate, which is currently presented as mainly being held within US Universities

This is a book that might look good on your shelf. Friends and visitors may be impressed by the literary company you keep. But this is not Stiglitz at his finest, and it reflects a hollowness to the so-called international debate, which is currently presented as mainly being held within US Universities. An observer viewing the debate that Stiglitz is part of, where he has to spend so much of his time and so many words in this book countering free-market maniacs, might conclude that by the year 2024, there is still no road to freedom in sight.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit:  Daniel Avram  on Shutterstock .

About the author

Danny Dorling is a professor in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Peter’s College. He is a patron of RoadPeace, Comprehensive Future, and Heeley City Farm. In his spare time, he makes sandcastles.

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Book Club: Come Discuss ‘Headshot,’ by Rita Bullwinkel

For The Book Review Podcast’s June book club, we’ll talk about “Headshot,” Rita Bullwinkel’s fierce and searching novel about the high-octane world of youth women’s boxing.

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MJ Franklin is an editor at the Book Review.

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Welcome to the Book Review Book Club. Every month, we select a book to discuss on our podcast and with our readers. Please leave your thoughts on this month’s book in this article’s comments. And be sure to check out some of our past conversations, including ones about “James,” by Percival Everett , and “Demon Copperhead,” by Barbara Kingsolver.

“Andi Taylor is pumping her hands together, hitting her own flat stomach, thinking not of her mother sitting at home with her little brother, not of her car, which barely got her here, not of her summer job, her lifeguarding at the overcrowded community pool, not of the 4-year-old she watched die, the 4-year-old she practically killed, and his blue cheeks. … She’s thinking about the things she always does wrong when she fights. … She is also thinking about the way Artemis Victor will get her.”

So begins Rita Bullwinkel’s novel, “Headshot,” about the fierce and competitive world of youth women’s boxing.

The story follows eight teenagers fighting in the Daughters of America Cup, a tournament staged in a dilapidated gym in Reno. The novel is structured around the tournament’s bracket, each chapter detailing a match between fighters, bout after bout, until finally a champion is declared.

The drama of the novel is twofold. We are thrown into the high-octane theater of each fight, as the boxers work to land punches and defeat their opponents. (“Rachel Doricko plans to destroy Kate Heffer in well-formed increments.”) But we also explore each girl’s life — the novel flashes into the past to see the baggage that each carries; into the future to see what will happen to each once her boxing career is over; and into the girls’ minds in the present, as they reckon with their intense desires to make something of themselves. (“Here, at the Daughters of America tournament, Tanya Maw is a fighter. But she is also just a child — just a girl waiting to see what her life will be like compared to the lives of the other people she knows.”)

Which is to say: “Headshot” is a novel about boxing, yes, but it’s also a novel about the existential maelstrom of teenage girlhood.

For June’s Book Review Podcast book club, we’re chatting about “Headshot,” by Rita Bullwinkel . The discussion will air on June 28 , and we’d love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by June 21, and we may mention your observations in the episode.

Here’s some related reading to get the conversation started:

Our critic Dwight Garner’s review of the novel: “ The impact of this novel, though, lasts a long time, like a sharp fist to your shoulder. It is so enveloping to read that you feel, at times, that you are writing it in your own mind. It contains no bogus psychologizing. Its wide-awake characters put me in mind of the singer Ian Dury’s immortal comment: ‘I’m not here to be remembered, I’m here to be alive.’” [ Read the full review here. ]

Bullwinkel’s interview with Olivia Parkes in Electric Literature: “In order to come to a match, in order to come to compete in something, you have to build the narrative in your mind that it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do. I’m interested in that dichotomy, of being forced to build a world for yourself that is so disparate from the world that society sees around you.” [ Read the full interview here .]

Kristen Roupenian’s review, for The New York Times Book Review, of Bullwinkel’s previous story collection, “Belly Up”: “In Bullwinkel’s creepy, deadpan debut, bodies become objects, objects become bodies, and bodies and objects fuse and part in fascinating, unsettling ways. For readers with the stomach for it, the book is full of squirmy pleasures.” [ Read the full review here. ]

We can’t wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy June and happy reading!

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Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

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Jenny Erpenbeck’s “ Kairos ,” a novel about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won the International Booker Prize , the renowned award for fiction translated into English.

Kevin Kwan, the author of “Crazy Rich Asians,” left Singapore’s opulent, status-obsessed, upper crust when he was 11. He’s still writing about it .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (Goop Press) Hardcover – June 7, 2022

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• Part of series Goop Press
• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Rodale Books
• Publication date June 7, 2022
• Dimensions 8.54 x 1.38 x 5.94 inches
• ISBN-10 0593233670
• ISBN-13 978-0593233672
• See all details

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Remembering Love

Before you pick up that verbal knife, before you brick yourself in even further, let me remind you that you love this person. And therein lies the rub, my friend. Do you remember, really, in that heated moment when fear or righteous anger courses through your veins, that you love this person? Do you remember it when your body shuts down and, for the life of you, you can barely squeak out a word or two? The sobering answer, if you’re dead honest with yourself, is that you do not. In that heated moment, the sweetness between you, the sense of the two of you as a team facing the world together, the sense of us, is nearly impossible to locate.

The good news is that the love is still there. The bad news is that it’s stored in parts of your brain, body, and nervous system that, in those flash moments, you no longer inhabit. Your endocrine system is on high alert, pumping stimulants into your bloodstream. Your autonomic nervous system—far below your consciousness—is in fight-or-flight, spurring you on or shutting you down. The higher functions of your brain (the prefrontal cortex, the reins) have gone completely offline, while the more primitive parts of your brain (the limbic system, particularly the amygdalae) have decisively taken over.

At those times, the brain is in a state in which the prefrontal cortex is neither connected to nor soothing the subcortical system. Without that soothing and connection, we lose a pause between what we feel and what we do. These more primitive parts of our bodies and brains care only about our personal survival; they have no interest in maintaining the vulnerability of intimacy. Us evaporates and becomes you and me, adversaries in a cold world of I win, you lose.

Us is the seat of closeness. You and me is the seat of adversarial contest. You and me is great when you are confronting a tiger, but less so when you are confronting your spouse, your boss, or your child. In those fraught moments, what makes it so hard to keep a cool head is a million or so years of evolution, plus one other powerful force: trauma. Trauma pulls you into survival mode, in which you are clenching your fists for the fight or clamping your jaws shut like a fortress. And the more trauma you sustained as a child, the more compelling you and me becomes.

If you are thinking, Well, gosh, I didn’t have much trauma growing up, my answer is maybe. We’ll talk about it later. But before you make up your mind, why not settle into my discussion of childhood trauma? Because sometimes it doesn’t take much. Depending on your constitution and a host of other variables, it may take only a slight tap on the egg to produce fissures that can last a lifetime.

What’s Your Trauma?

When I’m working with a couple, I have one important question in my mind. It’s not What are the stressors? Stressors—like the pandemic, money woes, mismatched sex drives, kids, and in-laws—are all important, but a well-functioning couple can handle a reasonable amount of stress. The critical question I think about is not even What is the dynamic, the choreography, between you? That’s also an important question, but it’s not the most essential. The central question I ask myself during a therapy session is simply this one: Which part of you am I talking to? 

Am I talking to the mature part of you, the one who’s present in the here and now? This is the part I call the Wise Adult. That’s the part that cares about us. Or am I speaking to a triggered part of you, to your adversarial you and me consciousness? The triggered part of you sees things through the prism of the past. I believe there’s no such thing as overreacting; it’s just that what someone is reacting to may no longer be what’s in front of them. One of the blessings that partners in intimate relationships bestow upon each other is the simple and healing gift of their presence. But in order to be present with your partner, you must yourself be in the present, not saturated by your past.

The phrase trauma memory is really a misnomer. You don’t remember trauma; you relive it. The combat vet who hears a car backfire and suddenly spins around like he’s gripping a rifle is not thinking, Now I’m walking down Main Street remembering combat. In that flash moment, the vet is viscerally back at war. The past superimposes itself onto the present, fundamentally confusing the mind. When our trauma is triggered, we might physically spring into fight-or-flight mode. Faced with an overwhelming shock—infidelity, for example—I’ve seen patients gasp and head for the door before they came to in my hallway. 

But most of us do not reenact the experience of the trauma itself. Instead, we act out the coping strategy that we evolved to deal with it. You were emotionally abandoned throughout your childhood, and so you’ve grown into a charming seducer, expert at securing others’ attention. Or you were intruded upon as a child, and now you operate behind walls; you are adept at keeping people out. I speak of this compensating part of us as the Adaptive Child.

One of my great mentors, Pia Mellody, spoke of the Adaptive Child as a “kid in grown-up’s clothing.” The Adaptive Child is a child’s version of an adult, the you that you cobbled together in the absence of healthy parenting. Here’s a chart detailing the traits of the Adaptive Child, as distinct from the Wise Adult.

Adaptive Child   Wise Adult

Black & White    Nuanced

Perfectionistic    Realistic

Relentless         Forgiving

Rigid                 Flexible

Harsh                Warm

Hard                 Yielding

Certain              Humble

Tight in body      Relaxed in body

I’d like you to notice a few things as you look at this chart. First of all, see how tight, certain, and black and white the Adaptive Child is? One of my clients said that her Adaptive Child was like a little fundamentalist who lived inside her. This is in contrast to the flexibility, humility, and appreciation of nuance that are characteristic of the Wise Adult—qualities you may also recognize, from the literature on adult development, as those associated with emotional maturity.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rodale Books (June 7, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593233670
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593233672
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.02 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.54 x 1.38 x 5.94 inches
• #61 in Marriage
• #68 in Love & Romance (Books)
• #205 in Motivational Self-Help (Books)

About the author

Terrence real.

Terrence Real is the bestselling author of I Dont Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression and How Can I Get Through to You?: Reconnecting Men and Women. He has been a practicing family therapist for more than twenty years and has lectured and given workshops across the country. In March 2002, Real founded the Relational Empowerment Institute. His work has been featured on NBC Nightly News, Today, Good Morning America, and Oprah, as well as in The New York Times, Psychology Today, Esquire, and numerous academic publications. He lives with his wife, family therapist Belinda Berman, and their two sons in Newton, Massachusetts.

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