UDM Libraries Book of the Week

Stuff: compulsive hoarding and the meaning of things

by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee

What possesses someone to save every scrap of paper that’s ever come into his home? What compulsions drive a woman like Irene, whose hoarding cost her her marriage? Or Ralph, whose imagined uses for castoff items like leaky old buckets almost lost him his house? Or Jerry and Alvin, wealthy twin bachelors who filled up matching luxury apartments with countless pieces of fine art, not even leaving themselves room to sleep?

Randy Frost and Gail Steketee were the first to study hoarding when they began their work a decade ago; they expected to find a few sufferers but ended up treating hundreds of patients and fielding thousands of calls from the families of others. Now they explore the compulsion through a series of compelling case studies in the vein of Oliver Sacks.With vivid portraits that show us the traits by which you can identify a hoarder–piles on sofas and beds that make the furniture useless, houses that can be navigated only by following small paths called goat trails, vast piles of paper that the hoarders “churn” but never discard, even collections of animals and garbage–Frost and Steketee explain the causes and outline the often ineffective treatments for the disorder.They also illuminate the pull that possessions exert on all of us. Whether we’re savers, collectors, or compulsive cleaners, none of us is free of the impulses that drive hoarders to the extremes in which they live.

For the six million sufferers, their relatives and friends, and all the rest of us with complicated relationships to our things, Stuff answers the question of what happens when our stuff starts to own us.

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Jesus wars: how four patriarchs, three queens, and two emperors decided what Christians would believe for the next 1,500 years

by Philip Jenkins

Jesus Wars reveals how official, orthodox teaching about Jesus was the product of political maneuvers by a handful of key characters in the fifth century. Jenkins argues that were it not for these controversies, the papacy as we know it would never have come into existence and that today’s church could be teaching some-thing very different about Jesus. It is only an accident of history that one group of Roman emperors and militia-wielding bishops defeated another faction.

Christianity claims that Jesus was, somehow, both human and divine. But the Bible is anything but clear about Jesus’s true identity. In fact, a wide range of opinions and beliefs about Jesus circulated in the church for four hundred years until allied factions of Roman royalty and church leaders burned cities and killed thousands of people in an unprecedented effort to stamp out heresy.

Jenkins recounts the fascinating, violent story of the church’s fifth-century battles over “right belief” that had a far greater impact on the future of Christianity and the world than the much-touted Council of Nicea convened by Constantine a century before.

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Sacred players: the politics of response in the Middle English religious drama

by Heather Hill-Vasquez

Offering a unique historical perspective to the study of medieval English drama, Heather Hill-Vásquez in Sacred Players argues that different treatments of audience and performance in the early drama indicate that the performance life of the drama may have continued well beyond its traditional placement in medieval history and into the Reformation and Renaissance eras. This historically expansive notion of the drama has several significant implications for the study of other religious drama also previously relegated to the English medieval period.

The idea that the drama could help determine both Protestant and Catholic devotional practice reveals the drama as a force that transcends medieval boundaries. Rather than documents preserving a fixed sacred meaning, extant manuscripts present texts wed closely to the inherent fluidity of performance, and to the flexibility of differing religious sensibilities. A consistently popular and powerful form of lay worship, the English religious drama previously seen as narrowly medieval in fact defined and reflected the varying nature of religious discourse and dramatic performance well into and beyond the Reformation.

Not only does Sacred Players explore this overlooked second life for the early drama, but it also argues that such a second life was driven by a focus on the role of audience response. Specifically, a politicizing of audience reception styles and devotional practices–a politicizing employed as Reformation polemic, influencing Eucharistic piety, and complicating the role of gender in worship–characterized much of the early English religious drama. Through its historically recursive and expansive approach to the early religious drama, Sacred Players examines previously unacknowledged and unexamined cultural forces that shaped the performance lifetime of these plays, and that promise to deepen our modern understanding of them.

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Brain storm: the flaws in the science of sex differences

by Rebecca M.  Jordan-Young

Female and male brains are different, thanks to hormones coursing through the brain before birth. That’s taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren’t more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads.

In this compelling book, Rebecca Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of “human brain organization theory,” Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn’t scientific at all.

Elegantly written, this book argues passionately that the analysis of gender differences deserves far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated science. “The evidence for hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain better resembles a hodge-podge pile than a solid structure…Once we have cleared the rubble, we can begin to build newer, more scientific stories about human development.”

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