Rebecca Reads

Last week I reread Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public as a part of the Martel-Harper Challenge.
While I was well aware that Jonathan Swift’s short essay is classic satire, I [...]

I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.
Jeannette Walls lives comfortably. She’s a married woman, a successful gossip reporter, and a strong individual. She knows what she wants out of life. And yet she has a [...]

To understand Flannery O’Connor’s short stories is understand the rural South that she was familiar with in the pre-1970s. Her stories focus on aspects character in human, every-day situations all revolving around her South, dealing with race relations, Christianity, rural versus city living, parent-child relationships, etc. She brings the reader into the settings by capturing [...]

In Dubliners, his collection of short stories, James Joyce captures Irish life, specifically the lives of Dubliners. Each story is a magnificent sketch of the people, setting, and situations; the entire collection presents a variety of such sketches. At the end of each sketch, I felt the despair that I believe Joyce intended to impart [...]

In the best-seller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, Daniel Goleman explores emotions and the cause of emotions from the perspective of physiology, psychology, and human and child development. While Emotional Intelligence helped me reconsider my default reactions and emotions in various situations, I can’t really say I enjoyed listening to this [...]

Depression is one of the most common social and emotional problems around the world. One in five people will experience major depression at some point in their lives. Women are especially susceptible (especially after childbirth), but everyone can and does succumb to periods of discouragement for any number of reasons.
Because depression is such a part [...]