Published

In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll offers a fresh, provocative account of Appalachia, and why it matters. He begins with the earliest European settlers, whose desire for vast forests to hunt in was frustrated by absentee owners―including George Washington and other founders―who laid claim to the region. Even as Daniel Boone became famous as a backwoods hunter and guide, the economy he represented was already in peril. Within just a few decades, Appalachian hunters and farmers went from pioneers to pariahs, from heroes to hillbillies, in the national imagination, and the area was locked into an enduring association with poverty and backwardness. Stoll traces these developments with empathy and precision, examining crucial episodes such as the Whiskey Rebellion, the founding of West Virginia, and the arrival of timber and coal companies that set off a devastating “scramble for Appalachia.”

At the center of Ramp Hollow is Stoll’s sensitive portrayal of Appalachian homesteads. Perched upon ridges and tucked into hollows, they combined small-scale farming and gardening with expansive foraging and hunting, along with distilling and trading, to achieve self-sufficiency and resist the dependence on cash and credit arising elsewhere in the United States. But the industrialization of the mountains shattered the ecological balance that sustained the households. Ramp Hollow recasts the story of Appalachia as a complex struggle between mountaineers and profit-seeking forces from outside the region. Drawing powerful connections between Appalachia and other agrarian societies around the world, Stoll demonstrates the vitality of a peasant way of life that mixes farming with commerce but is not dominated by a market mind-set. His original investigation, ranging widely from history to literature, art, and economics, questions our assumptions about progress and development, and exposes the devastating legacy of dispossession and its repercussions today.

We all know we should give to charity, but who really does? Approximately three quarters of Americans give their time and money to various charities, churches, and causes, the other quarter of the population does not. Why has America split into two nations: givers and non-givers?

Arthur Brooks, a top scholar of economics and public policy, has spent years researching this trend, and even he was surprised by what he found. In Who Really Cares?, he demonstrates that conservatives really are compassionate—far more compassionate than their liberal foes. Strong families, church attendance, earned income (rather than state-subsidized income), and the belief that individuals, not government, offer the best solution to social ills—all are factors that determine how likely one is to give.

Charity matters—not just to the giver and the recipient—but to the nation as a whole. It is crucial to our prosperity, happiness, health, and our ability to govern ourselves as a free people. In Who Really Cares?, Arthur Brooks outlines strategies for expanding the ranks of givers, for the good of all Americans.

Almost everyone feels the pangs of loneliness in certain moments. It can be brief and superficial—being the last one chosen for a team on the playground—or acute and severe—suffering the death of a spouse or dear friend. Transient loneliness is so common, in fact, that we simply accept it as a fact of life. Humans are, after all, inherently social beings. When asked to describe the pleasures that contribute most to happiness, a vast majority of people rate love, intimacy, and social affiliation above wealth or fame, even above physical health. Given the importance that social connection plays in the behavior of our species, then, it is all the more troubling that at any given moment, roughly 20 percent of individuals feel sufficiently lonely for it to be a major source of unhappiness in their lives.

In his groundbreaking research on social isolation, John Cacioppo has pried loose the keystone of modern medicine and psychology—the focus on the individual as the unit of inquiry. Using brain scans, blood pressure measurements, assays of immune function, and even changes in DNA replication, his work has revealed the overpowering influence of social context. In this important new book, he and writer William Patick bring loneliness out of the shadow of its cousin depression, and show how fear of social isolation uniquely disrupts our perceptions, behavior, and physiology. Overturning the myth that human nature is a “war of all against all,” Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection shows how social cooperation is humanity’s defining characteristic. With this new understanding, we can begin to break the trap of isolation, both as individuals and as a society.

If we could turn the clock back psychologically, could we also turn the clock back physically? In 1979, social psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a ground-breaking study that aimed to answer this provocative question.

For just one week, Langer arranged for a group of elderly men to live in a house staged as though it were 1959, a time that most of them considered their prime. The men experienced amazing changes across the board: their physical strength, cognition, vision, hearing and taste improved dramatically, and by the end of only the second day, all were less dependent on others to get what they needed.

Drawing on this elegant study and colorful examples from her full body of work, Counterclockwise explores the ways in which our thoughts control our moods and our physical state; how our attitudes define our limits; how our mindless desire for stability actually cuts us off from the healing power of mindfully attending to variability; and what we can do to be free of these restrictions. At once scientifically riveting and immensely inspiring, the theory and advice in Counterclockwise has enormously exciting implications for our general health, for our outlook, for our fundamental happiness. If the elderly men in Langer’s original experiment could produce such dramatic changes in their lives, so too can the rest of us, but we don’t have to live in a time capsule to do so.

Backed by her landmark scientific work on mindfulness and artistic nature, bestselling author and Harvard psychologist Ellen J. Langer shows us that creativity is not a rare gift that only some special few are born with, but rather an integral part of everyone’s makeup. All of us can express our creative impulses—authentically and uniquely—and, in the process, enrich our lives. Why then do so many of us merely dream of someday painting, someday writing, someday making music? More important, why do so many of us tell ourselves that we can’t do so?

With the skill of a gifted logician, Langer demonstrates how we undervalue ourselves and undermine our creativity. By example, she persuades us to have faith in our creative works, not because someone else approves of them but because they’re a true expression of ourselves. Her high-spirited, challenging book sparkles with wit and intelligence and inspires in us an infectious enthusiasm for our creations, our world, and ourselves. It will be of lifelong value to everyone who reads it.