Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

Vital Friends:                                The People You Can't Afford to Live Without   By Tom Rath Reviewed by    Geoffrey W. Sutton Events like Covid-19, severe illnesses, and disasters remind us of the importance of friends.   Weaving together stories, historical examples, published research, and survey data, Rath makes the case for the importance of close friends (i,e, Vital Friends) to life-satisfaction and productivity. The author organized 14 chapters into four parts. Four appendixes, research notes, suggested reading, and acknowledgments complete this  easy-to-read paperback.   In the six chapters that comprise part one, we learn Rath's point that our culture may have focused too heavily on personal growth to the exclusion of developing relationships with others. In addition to examples from daily life, Rath invokes the research of Gottman to show the importance of positive interactions to marital and individual well-being.   The three chapters of pa

  Notorious RBG      By Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton   Notorious RBG caught my eye when looking for a book to listen to on our recent trip. Of course, her death had a lot to do with making Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life salient. The subtitle, The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg , makes it clear this is a biography. My wife and I liked the book because it gave us insight into this woman’s strength and determination, capacity for love, and her brilliant mind. The authors help us understand how her character and experience enabled her to fight sexism and cancer on a grand scale. Her lifelong love for her husband stands out in a time when so many relationships end badly. We also begin to understand how she could write powerful arguments yet be friends with those having a different worldview like conservative justice, Antonin Scalia.  RBG was a woman who could argue fiercely for her perspective on justice yet keep focus on people who are

LIVING WELL AND  DYING FAITHFULLY:  CHRISTIAN PRACTICES FOR     END-OF-LIFE CARE   Edited By      John Swinton       & Richard Payne    Reviewed by       Geoffrey W. Sutton “Dying is a spiritual event with medical implications,” opined Gwen London, the former director of the Institute on Care at the End of Life at Duke University (xv).  I am reminded of a story about a Christian health care professional who was glad to be assigned to a pediatric ward from a geriatric ward where elderly patients were dying without having faith in Christ. She believed that God would save children from eternal damnation were they to die. Clearly, religious faith is a significant part of the identity of many people on earth. Most, if not all, religions imbue life and death with meaning. The brute fact of death has been widely studied in psychological science--especially in the context of T error Management Theory where terror refers to the awareness of one's own death.