SELF-HELP FROM THE MIDDLE AGES: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living, never forget people are ALWAYS people not labels

SELF-HELP FROM THE MIDDLE AGES: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living
PETER JONES
Doubleday (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From medieval historian Peter Jones comes a groundbreaking guide to navigating contemporary life through the wisdom of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Peter Jones was teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia when his third icy winter there plunged him into a dark place. Luckily, he knew something few of us know—that for all its reputation for darkness and superstition, the Middle Ages were the golden age of self-help. So he set out on a journey to explore the wisdom of medieval scholars, saints, and mystics, looking for an alternative path through the challenges of modern life.

Never in history, Jones marvels in Self-Help from the Middle Ages, has so much energy and talent gone into studying how the mind works as in the medieval centuries. Although today we think of the Seven Deadly Sins as a catalog of forbidden behavior, in the Middle Ages, at the height of their currency, they were a path to self-knowledge and self-forgiveness. Together, pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust were a psychological map that laid out seven basic patterns of thought, showing how our thinking can go astray and how we can find our way home.

In Self-Help from the Middle Ages, Jones explores each sin, searching the hellscapes of Hieronymous Bosch and Giotto, the intimate confessions of Dante and Margery Kempe, and the personal struggles of Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena. Along the way he discovers a treasure trove of lost truths about temptation, frustration, addiction, compulsion, burnout, rage, fear, anxiety, and grief that still pulse with life. With beautiful illustrations drawn from medieval art and literature, his book is a gift to all who love history and anyone who has ever sought wisdom from the past.

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My Review: What happens when a scholarly British man with an advanced medieval-history degree from an American school gets a seriously good job in Russophone academia? He moves to Siberia! (Before the Ukraine war begins. He lives in Madrid now.)

Siberia. The place Russia sends people to die in misery. A byword, in US English anyway, for grim, awful exile, for the place you're sent to pay for your sins. I'm afraid this is where I start revealing my prejudices: I envied this polyglot scholar for his seriously good luck. I envied him for living a life I'm still feeling angry at being denied a chance to pursue (though Siberia was never in my mind as an option). So already two of the deadly sins ticked off—again—my life's list of the damned things committed. Oh okay, I'm getting the point now, thought I.

Siberia, the severeness of it, wore on the spirit of Author Jones. He experienced the dark night of the soul, the terrible trackless waste of depression. Being a scholar by nature the solution was obvious: you are not the first person to have this problem. How did those others handle it? The seven deadly sins offer up a schema for understanding the workings of the human mind as well as a perspective check on what your emotional weather really means.

These "sins" are, of course, deeply enmeshed with christian concepts of a religiously ordered universe. Sin more broadly is a religious concept of transgressing a divinely ordained code and appears in multiple religious traditions. It's only natural that a medievalist from England would gravitate towards concepts familiar from his scholarly activities.

In the memoir portions of this narrative, the author evokes very movingly the experience of researching, identifying, and handling medieval manuscripts that contain the seven deadly sins and their explications of how these can be used to improve one's soul. The goal in these readings iss to give the reader a map towards salvation, union with the god of the christians; but as Author Jones elucidates, how different is that goal from modern self-help books' stated goal of helping one become better, happier, more adept at navigating your life. People have sought ways to understand their inner workings, how to cultivate their minds/souls into "better" or "happier" behaviors since the oracle at Delphi...much earlier than that, I am certain, because a pithy aperçu like "know thyself" isn't a first draft, and it is carved in literal stone so it's been workshopped to a fare-thee-well, though it wasn't done in writing so the records are implicit only.

We're highly intelligent, us humans, curious about ourselves because we're so different from other creatures. We have access to the thoughts and the musings and the conclusions of millennia of our forebears. A scholar would know where and how to look for insight into issues common to us all. Descriptions of depression, of psychological maladjustments, maladaptive behaviors, and solutions to the problems arising therefrom, might vary but the impetus to look for ways to be, feel, act "better" is constant. Author Jones seeks the commonality between the seven deadly sins and modern self-help schemata because he needs help, knows our ancestors...sons, daughters, lovers, spouses just like us...needed help figuring out the best ways to be fulfilled. He accomplishes this in the way that best uses his personal strengths. He tells us about his quest in plainly personal terms, clearly stating his stakes in starting the quest. (I frame it as a quest because he's a medievalist and "happiness" is a grail quest.) It is more this strand of his narrative that I found involving, engaging. I was less invested in the rubber-meets-the-road formulations of how the personally offensive to me religious concept of the sins themselves represent paths to self-knowledge. This is a very useful and, to me, persuasive argument. It's offensive to me because the religion it's embedded within is evil and vile, used to create division and enact horrors of cruelty; if there is a "God" as they name her, and she tolerates these terrible acts committed in her nsme, she is not the kind of god who deserves worship.

None of that is addressed in this book; I can't offer an otherwise fully merited fifth star because to do so is to accept a fundamental agreement with an argument for "God" and her christian system's validity.

This is purely a personal inability to tolerate any support of the christian worldview,however tacit it may be, as in any way moral or positively constructive.

BLACK BAG, award-winning poet/novelist tantalizes with identity-exploring novel

BLACK BAG
LUKE KENNARD
Zando (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE Shortlist will be announced on September 22.

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?

In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation . . .

A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

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My Review: I...don't know about the impact, impression, image this one's left on and in my brain. It's kind of a lot as a read. Many will flinch at the punctuation and dialogue tags being unorthodox. Others (me among 'em) will get cold collywobbles from the fact this is based around a real experiment performed in an academic setting.

I'll never be fully easy around stories where people do bizarre, kind of abuse-enabling things for money. Please see Docile by K.M. Szpara for my perfect squeam-book. This story is worse...it basically happened, though this is not non-fiction about the real events.

The premise, as you've seen, is weird...the jacket illustration is about the best match for the subject one will ever find. So there is no ambiguity or misdirection in aesthetic or factual presentation. That's where unambiguous territory ends in this story. Our actor MC, hereinafter "Black Bag" because his name is never vouchsafed to us, is slightly desperate for a paying gig, but as we discover over time he is generally slightly desperate. Dr. Blend (!) chose him well, deliberately, and knowingly as we learn over the course of the story. His job is to be physically present in the back of this psychology class, featureless and silent, for some socially experimental purpose.

It doesn't take long for the students to attempt interactions with Black Bag. Could you resist a looming presence that's giving nothing of any human sort? No eyes? No face? No noises of normal body functioning...breathing, swallowing, sighing...all muffled by the bag? What sounds uncanny would naturally become deeply unsettling, irresistibly fascinating, unnervingly alluring, as it sat among, but not a part of, the entire class. There are characters attempting to get responses from Black Bag. There are characters thinking of Black Bag, not obviously gendered, as a sexual challenge. Others as a gender-wars provocation. Others still as a threat of undetermined severity and unknown nature. What those responses start as, and how they morph through Black Bag's unresponsive presence, is utterly unexpected to the participants in the experiment.

Is that an entire over-300-page novel's-worth of story? It's true I was always interested in the read. As it happened, the story flowed from sentence to sentence with pleasurable facility of expression as one would expect of award-winning Author Kennard. At the end of the chapters...and there are 89 of 'em...I'd lose steam in the reading experience and it would take a week or more for me to feel prompted to pick it up again. I'm not entirely sure this is not related to my own participation in the experiment through the read...was I ever not part of the experiment, as in did Author Kennard not envision that the act of reading this story was another facet of responding to Black Bag? Was he also responding to the experiment by getting fascinated by the story, writing it...always an act of externalization as writing requires, at its core, a version of narrative therapy?

As we travel through the course being taught, the effects of the experiment on Black Bag himself morph and grow more and more pervasive. It's not surprising, on the one hand, that he becomes really comfortable in the protective space of the black bag. He's a struggling actor. His career prospects, before the anonymity of the black bag, weren't great. But inside the black bag, his identity is mysterious, intriguing, alluring...all things an actor loves, relies on for securing and doing his job. He wasn't being seen as those things walking around in his normal condition and now he is.

So walking around the campus and the town as Black Bag makes perfect sense, then.

Not to my claustrophobic self. I battled a sense of desperate, breathless resistance every time he put the stupid thing on.

So that might explain why I found the ending...wanting. Justine, a true and complete freak, enters into Black Bag's orbit with the firm intent of making Black Bag a conquest. Claudio, more reserved but still excitable and into Black Bag (apparently platonically though there's ambiguity and vibey-ness enough to make my gaydar ping) is the other side character who interested me. Others are involved, but honestly, they're just not that fascinating to me. Squishy, blah Sophie most of all. All the way through the read he's Black Bag, he's there as a screen for these people to project fantasies, needs, fears onto all blank and visually heavy like black objects tend to be.

The experiment, the last one Dr. Blend will conduct as he is retiring after this course, is ambiguous in design by design. That means it ends ambiguously. I was expecting that. I felt, however, this iteration of the story left the events unresolved in the dramatic sense...the final scene as an ending wasn't, the real ending as in the place the story resolved itself was earlier, with this musing inner speech from Black Bag:

Have you ever met a man who got exactly what he wanted? They always seem a little confused, even shell-shocked, They speak at one remove, as if delivering their own eulogy.
I wish to be alive, to continue to live, even should that mean a state of constant deferral. How much do you want to appear in other people's thoughts at all? As little as possible, I think. If I could, I would take everything I have ever thought about anyone else and delete it forever.

I think the story is fascinating but the not-main characters less so. I'd say this is an ideal library borrow, one that will reward you for reading it but not compel most of us to revisit it time and again.

SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS REVISED & EXPANDED EDITION The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business...comprehensive title!

SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS REVISED & EXPANDED EDITION The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business
THOMAS ERIKSON
St. Martin's Essentials (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fully revised and expanded edition of the runaway bestseller, Surrounded by Idiots—now with Text • Charts • Examples • Snark!

Master the four basic behavior types and change the way you communicate!

Do you ever think you’re the only one making any sense? Or tried to reason with your partner with disastrous results? Do long, rambling answers drive you crazy?

You are not alone. After a disastrous meeting with a highly successful entrepreneur, who was genuinely convinced he was ‘surrounded by idiots,’ communication expert and bestselling author Thomas Erikson dedicated himself to understanding how people function and why we often struggle to connect with certain personality types.

Erikson’s simple yet ground-breaking techniques will help you understand yourself better, hone communication and social skills, handle conflict with confidence, improve dynamics with your boss and team, and get the best out of the people you deal with and manage.

At a moment in time when understanding one another is more important than ever, Thomas Erikson revisits his most popular title, offering an updated and expanded edition that will make you a master of communication.

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My Review: If anyone reading this has not yet read SURROUNDED BY NARCISSISTS: How to Effectively Recognize, Avoid, and Defend Yourself Against Toxic People (and Not Lose Your Mind) I recommend you go do that.

Back so soon? Okay, here we go.

I didn't read the original version so cannot comment on whatever might be new in the presentation of the text. I can tell you it's easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to misuse. You are not going to be a mental-health professional after reading this book. I think anyone who feels frustrated and put-upon by the goofballs and simps surrounding them should go get a therapist. To be completely honest I think that anyway...go get a therapist! It will change your life for the better.

Absent that, reading this book is best done with the realization that at least a dozen people are reading it because of you. It behooves all of us to get better at communication with people not like ourselves, but from a place of non-judgmental desire to be better about our affect in this world.

I can hear y'all snickering, it's really quite rude. I already said it's best to read this (and all other books like it) in the full realization that others are reading them to detoxify your affect on them. I really mean that. Communication problems are always mutual. When you simply dislike someone you still need to be able to communicate with them to be effective in any social situation where there are other people...in other words, all of them. Talking to MAGAts or religious nuts is hard, but we all need to do it sometimes. I myownself keep interactions with them as short as possible and avoid eye contact the way an old pal of mine does with Mondays, for the same reason.

This particular iteration of the DISC / Meyers-Briggs system, using colors in place of letters, works as well as these things ever do: Not very, but useful as a quick issue-defusing technique. It's easy to internalize, comes with built-in shorthand, and can help you walk away from difficult conversations without creating more trouble.

It's not, and does not purport or pretend to be, a substitute for the hard work of therapy. Which everyone should do. But since there's no way in hell most lazy slugs will bother, and no way most people can afford it if they were willing (which they're not), and no easy way to find or know how to judge which therapist is the right one for you, we have books like this.

Use it the way he tells you to and you will do no (further) harm.

That alone is worth more than the purchase price.

HOW TO BE ENOUGH: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists, or "explaining my entire life to me"

HOW TO BE ENOUGH: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists
ELLEN HENDRIKSEN, Ph.D.
St. Martin's Essentials (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Are you your own toughest critic? Learn to be good to yourself with this clear and compassionate guide.

Do you set demanding standards for yourself? If so, a lot likely goes well in your life: You might earn compliments, admiration, or accomplishments. Your high standards and hard work pay off.

But privately, you may feel like you’re falling behind, faking it, or different from everybody else. Your eagle-eyed inner quality control inspector highlights every mistake. You try hard to avoid criticism, but criticize yourself. Trying to get it right is your guiding light, but it has lit the way to a place of dissatisfaction, loneliness, or disconnection. In short, you may look like you’re hitting it out of the park, but you feel like you’re striking out.

This is perfectionism. And for everyone who struggles with it, it’s a misnomer: perfectionism isn’t about striving to be perfect. It’s about never feeling good enough.

Dr. Ellen Hendriksen—clinical psychologist, anxiety specialist, and author of How to Be Yourself—is on the same journey as you. In How to Be Enough, Hendriksen charts a flexible, forgiving, and freeing path, all without giving up the excellence your high standards and hard work have gotten you. She delivers seven shifts—including from self-criticism to kindness, control to authenticity, procrastination to productivity, comparison to contentment—to find self-acceptance, rewrite the Inner Rulebook, and most of all, cultivate the authentic human connections we’re all craving.

With compassion and humor, Hendriksen lays out a clear, effective, and empowering guide. To enjoy rather than improve, be real rather than impressive, and be good to yourself when you’re wired to be hard on yourself.

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My Review: I was the youngest child of my parents. My older siblings were more like aunts than siblings...we were two presidencies apart, almost three...and as adolescents lumbered with a toddler they didn't want in their ambit, weren't any more careful of word or deed than one would expect from members of a toxic system at a terrible passage in human life. In other words, not kind, not loving, not supportive. Add that to parents who didn't model those things and...well.

This book understood me.

So much of the world is based on conditionality: if you want this thing/state/privilege, you must give that thing/service. Conditionality and capitalism are deeply intertwined, I venture to suggest inseparably so. One's self-worth in a capitalist system becomes imbued with that transactional conditionality: I'm not working hard enough to deserve this or that bauble. Far worse is the knock-on of that, I'm too "poor" to afford this thing/service so I must be lazy/undeserving/unworthy.

It enters one's bones and imbues all one's relationships: I'm not getting this thing/behavior/feeling I need so I must not deserve it...if I work harder/behave better/give more of this or that resource I have, maybe then I will deserve or even get it.

The internalization of perfectionism is thus complete and the transactional relationship template is frozen into immobility. As are many of us who got this message. We're frozen into immobility because then the desired whatevers *not* being ours makes sense. We don't deserve whatever. Therefore the world makes sense because we don't have it.

A book like this one that makes the pathology plain does a huge service to the sufferer from the condition. It's wonderful to be told plainly and baldly that: "Pretty much every high achieving person experiences a gravitational pull to feel left out. Meaning we reflexively look for signs and signals that tell you you’re being excluded or not wanted." It's a balm to know the roots of this awful paralysis are there in multitudes of us, then be told how that: "What perfectionism neglects to tell us is that getting it right doesn’t make us part of a community." Ultimately, we've bought the bullshit and not the bull himself; we paid for the bull, and now here's a way to get him.

The author is, I suspect, an excellent therapist in practice. In writing she is clear, concise, and manages to be evocative in her phrasemaking. No small feat! I don't tthink this book is for those who struggle to see their own pathologies, there are more effective tools to break walls of denial. I think most readers are some way into the process of denial-busting, but again the best audience for the read are those who already see their perfectionism, have an idea it's a problem, and would like some help building coping strategies for its dismantling.

This book is a wonderfully useful tool for that purpose. I can't offer a full fifth star because there is just that soupçla;on too little interlinking of strategic implementation: How, after this insight hits home, the reader should look for that and the other one to arise.

As cavils go, it's really pretty minor. As self-help books go, this one belongs on far more bookshelves/Kindles than it doesn't.