All tagged resilience

The Marriage Portrait

Maggie O’Farrell has done it again. She has rendered up a heroine of flesh and blood, whim and heartache, from the annals of European history. O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait (2022) fictionalizes the brief life of Lucrezia de’ Medici who married the Duke of Ferrara (Modeno, and Reggio as well) at age fifteen. As with O’Farrell’s last novel, Hamnet—also historical fiction—The Marriage Plot introduces readers to a vivacious young woman, bound in and restrained by her time, her class, and what everyone deems her destiny. This is novel rich in storytelling and moving prose. It is a masterpiece; one that transports readers to the regal rooms of sixteenth-century Florence and Ferrara.

The Coddling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018) came out five years ago and yet its message seems even more relevant today. Published before pandemic fueled parents and youth to even greater levels of anxiety and fear, The Coddling scrutinizes the generational shift on the part of society, schools, and parents that matches the advent of smart phone technology and the rise of social media. Those cultural transformations, the authors argue, led to a generation that equates physical safety with freedom from differing opinions and world views. Their thesis, that American families, universities, and society generally have lost sight of three fundamental truths when it comes to youth; in so doing we have fostered a climate of fragility and safetyism that undermines human resilience and encourages anxiety, us-vs-them culture, and rebrands discomfort and disagreement as unsafe. If their book was a must-read pre-pandemic, it is utterly imperative today.