Jennifer Michael Hecht

In the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn To Decadence, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind especially-from Socrates to Galileo and Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking. This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning,This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists.

"We think of our version of a happy life as more like physics than like pop songs; we expect the people of the next century to agree with our basic tenets—for instance, that broccoli is good for a happy life and that opium is bad—but they will not. Our rules for living are more like the history of pop songs. They make weird sense only to the people of each given time period. They aren't true. This book shows you how past myths functioned, and likewise how our myths of today function, and thus lets you out of the trap of thinking you have to pay heed to any of them."The Happiness Myth is a fascinating cultural history that both reveals our often silly assumptions about how we pursue happiness today and offers up real historical lessons that have stood the test of time. Hecht delivers memorable insights into the five practical means we choose to achieve happiness: wisdom, drugs, money, bodies, and celebration.Hecht liberates us from today's scolding, quasi-scientific messages that insist there is only one way to care for our minds and bodies. Hecht looks at contemporary happiness advice and explains why much of it doesn't work. "Modern culture," she writes, "is misrepresenting me and spending a lot of money to do it."Rich with hilarious anecdotes about both failed and successful paths to happiness, Hecht's book traces a common thread of advice—she calls it "sour charm wisdom"—that we can still apply today to create authentic, lasting happiness.

Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our “secular age” in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment’s insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.

The Wonder Paradox offers a lively, practical, and transcendent roadmap to meaning and connection through poetry.Religion once formed the rhythms and structures of society: marking time with calendars, carving out space for contemplation, creating connection, reinforcing legacy and morality. Now, for many, religion no longer runs the show.So where shall we find our magic? How do we celebrate milestones? Which texts can focus our attention but still offer space for inquiry, communion, and the chance to dwell for a dazzling instant in what can't be said? The answer, Jennifer Michael Hecht--the historian, poet, and bestselling author of Doubt--tells us, is poetry.In twenty chapters built from years of questions and conversation with those looking for an authentic and meaningful life, Hecht offers ways to excavate the useful aspects of tradition and to replace what no longer feels true. Through cultures and poetic wisdom from around the world--Sappho, Rumi, Shakespeare, Issa, Tagore, Frost, Szymborska, Angelou, and others--she blends literary criticism with spiritual guidance rooted in the everyday. Linking our needs to particular poems, she helps us better understand those needs, ourselves, and poetry.Our capacity for wonder is one of the greatest joys of being human; The Wonder Paradox celebrates that instinct and that yearning. Like Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, it promises to inspire generations of readers.

A tour de force, Funny is a masterpiece of poetic, as well as philosophic and comic, invention. It creates a musing world, where the issues are philosophical but the focus is always on people, on our most private ways of balancing our accounts. The poems are psychological; tender and humane, and somehow ruthless. This is poetry that swarms with ideas, that revels in rhythmic intricacy and literary references, but is also clear as a bell, and tells marvelous stories.

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s purpose in The Next Ancient World is clear and to offer a guidebook for those that come after. She does all that and more, delivering verse after verse with astonishing wit and precision to craft a narrative that truly goes above and beyond. Hecht turns the everyday into the immaculate, creating a simple yet jaw-dropping voice. In lines like “the deadline/for the grant is long past, long past/but some part of you/writes for guidelines… This is not what the survival/expert had in mind”, Hecht demonstrates her tongue-in-cheek wit.This wit that has taken her far, especially after the acclaim that The Next Ancient World received upon its publishing Now, twenty years later, Hecht’s lines are clear indicators of the long career that awaited her, demonstrating an unmatched understanding and mastery of both language and verse.

"Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language."—Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate "Hecht's rhymes are irregular, gymnastic, pointed, and fun; she's found what so many would-be populists seek, an idiom entirely conversational yet able to sustain unexpected ideas."— The Believer Who Said is a meditation on life's profound questions told through playful engagement with iconic poems and lyrics. Jennifer Michael Hecht's book is a magic echo chamber wherein great poems come back to us, altered to fit the concerns of our moment. This wildly interpretive treatment of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and the rock band Nirvana is original, occasionally hilarious, and always moving. From "Not Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening": "Promises to keep," was a lie, he had nothing. Throughthe woods. Over the river and into the pain. It is an addict'stalk of quitting as she's smacking at a vein. He was alwaysgoing into the woods. It was he who wrote, "The only way around is through." You'd think a shrink, but no, a poet. He saw the woods and knew. The forest is the one that holdspromises. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, they fillwith a quiet snow. Miles are traveled as we sleep. He steers his horse off the road. Among the trees now, the blizzardis a dusting. Holes in the canopy make columns of snowstorm, lit from above. His little horse thinks it is queer. They godeeper, sky gets darker. It's the darkest night of the year . . . Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of several nonfiction titles, most recently The Happiness Myth (HarperOne). She teaches at The New School and lives in the BoCoCa neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

On October 19, 1876 a group of leading French citizens, both men and women included, joined together to form an unusual group, The Society of Mutual Autopsy, with the aim of proving that souls do not exist. The idea was that, after death, they would dissect one another and (hopefully) show a direct relationship between brain shapes and sizes and the character, abilities and intelligence of individuals. This strange scientific pact, and indeed what we have come to think of as anthropology, which the group's members helped to develop, had its genesis in aggressive, evangelical atheism.With this group as its focus, The End of the Soul is a study of science and atheism in France in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows that anthropology grew in the context of an impassioned struggle between the forces of tradition, especially the Catholic faith, and those of a more freethinking modernism, and moreover that it became for many a secular religion. Among the adherents of this new faith discussed here are the novelist Emile Zola, the great statesman Leon Gambetta, the American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes embodied the triumph of ratiocination over credulity.Boldly argued, full of colorful characters and often bizarre battles over science and faith, this book represents a major contribution to the history of science and European intellectual history.