5 books to be on the safe side this Christmas

 

Haven't bought a gift yet? Here are some of the books I've read recently if you need some quick ideas or just want to add to the gifts you've already bought.

Chaim Potok: The Chosen

He has been writing since he was sixteen. I have never seen the father-son relationship portrayed in such depth as it is by him, whom I have read regularly since "My Name Is Asher Lev", the story of a boy torn between the role of a brilliant artist and the Hasidic Jewish role of a boy loyal to his parents. His novel, "The Chosen", rivals the former. But the film based on it has changed the story a lot, so the book is the one to choose.

Danny and Ruven become friends after a chance meeting. They both have a different relationship with their father. Ruven is raised alone by his father, with whom he has an intimate, direct relationship, and the boy can turn to him for anything. Danny is the son of a rabbi, who keeps an emotional distance from him, and his particular parenting style is to barely speak to him, except when he is giving him religious exams in front of the whole congregation. Danny has a brilliant, photographic memory, and his father and their community take it for granted that he will follow in his father's footsteps and become the new rabbi. Except that Danny wants to study psychology, which would be a complete turn away from the life his father has destined for him. When Danny meets Ruven, his desire to go to university turns into a real determination that will test his relationship with his father.

Potok shows us how to love well and how to give our children wings, even if they don't choose a life that lives up to our expectations.

 

Magdolna Hargittai: Women In Science

Originally published in New York, "Women in Science" includes astronomers, physicists, chemists, biologists and doctors from all over the world, including Hungary, as well as women researchers and leaders from the third world. It was here that I first read about Ilona Banga, who could also have won a Nobel Prize for her role in the discovery of vitamin C. Like Katalin Karikó, she was a researcher at the University of Szeged.

With few exceptions, it was not until the late 19th century that women were allowed to enter science, mostly at their husbands' side - if they were allowed to do research, they were not paid. In many cases, their results were overlooked because they were published in the husband's name because of the joint work. Even Nobel laureates were sometimes only allowed to do research at the university where their husband was working. Even in the 1960s, CERN did not pay physicist wives of physicist husbands, saying there were too many of them.

’This book introduces us to women scientists who have been able to find balance in their lives and who deserve our deep respect,’ says Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Ronald Hoffmann.

 

Tara Westover: Educated

A memoir by a Cambridge University lecturer. It is the coming-of-age story of a woman who cannot go to school, who does not even know the date of her birth, who is dependent on a fanatical father who controls the family and has severe mental problems, and who isolates her family on a mountain to wait for the end of the world. Tara nevertheless gets into college, then Cambridge, then Harvard. She must do so against the overwhelming objections of her family. She achieves success she never hoped for when her father goes after her for Harvard, and in possibly one of the most abusive displays of parenting in the history of the university, Tara's career seems to be permanently split in two.

There are some surprisingly strong scenes in the book. For example, when in a packed lecture hall at the college she doesn't understand what the term Holocaust means, and when she asks the teacher, there is stunned silence and he doesn't answer. When she looks it up, she realises that she hasn't understood anything about her mother's "homeschooling", with whom she was pretty much looking at flowers in the field. Or when in Cambridge the teacher takes them up to the roof to show them the view, and in the strong winds everyone is clinging to the wall, and Tara walks along without a care on the roof. Then she explains to the worried teacher that when she helps to carpent the roof at home, it's safe to walk as if she were on the ground, because it's just psychic: you have to cling on in the high winds. Because the father uses his children as construction workers because he can't pay employees. This is not a story from the 1930s, but from just a few years ago.

 

Stefanie Stahl: Yes, No, Maybe

There have been countless books written about attachment, and for good reason, it is one of the most researched areas of psychology. Parents have a huge responsibility to their children for the rest of their lives, based on whether they love them well enough. This is the basis of whether later on their children can love and bond well enough, even with the same person, throughout their lives.

What may seem like an impossible mission is not. For me, psychotherapist Stefanie Stahl's book is one of the best on the subject. She says that commitment phobia is at the root of many relationship problems. She explains the behaviour of people with commitment phobia, what kind of fear lies behind it, and shows how to overcome this condition. It provides a big picture that has rewritten my previous notions of secure and insecure attachment styles.

Is the avoidant attachment style of today's metropolitan male hurting everyone, or are some people getting it right? What is his real defect from childhood? Does the attachment style of the man or the woman determine the dynamics of the relationship? Does the secure attachment developed by a good enough parent through decades of painstaking work persist throughout adulthood or can it be damaged in adulthood? The title, however, seems suggestive, so it is worth considering who to give it to.

 

Kazuo Ishiguro: When We Were Orphans

Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, does not disappoint. This novel is less well known than the Oscar-winning film on which "The Remains Of The Day" is based, and is not for fans of a fast-paced plot, but if you can get caught up in the story, the more you'll be rewarded.

In the early 20th century, a British couple disappear in Shanghai. Their son Christopher is sent to London, where he grows up to become a private detective. After successfully solving countless crimes, he increasingly feels that the time has come to return to war-torn, politically divided Shanghai and find out what really happened to his parents.

The story features one particular woman and three different types of men. The men are scattered on a scale of unpredictability, and it's certainly not the sociopathic Chinese local warlord who wins the race in the "what no one expected" category.