Stories can explore complicated ideas and bring shared experiences to life. Footage of the Knicks’ upset win in the NBA finals triggers a traumatic memory of family tragedy. A young girl starts bullying her best friend after her big sister goes off to sleepaway camp. An adolescent works through her feelings of anger at her father over her parents’ divorce after discovering his infidelity. A patient’s ugly shoes remind an analyst of her own childhood scars. A daughter recognizes her Holocaust-survivor father’s resilience as she comes to terms with his vulnerability after a life-altering accident. Bringing together these narratives and many more, When the Garden Isn’t Eden reveals how psychoanalysis sheds light on the troubles of everyday life. Through poignant and sometimes painful stories from their personal and professional lives, three practicing psychoanalysts demonstrate the richness of psychodynamic thinking. Each chapter offers an illustrative and powerful personal vignette followed by an analytical reflection that explicates key psychodynamic concepts, showing how these ideas inform and deepen our understanding of what makes us human. Blending storytelling and psychotherapy, When the Garden Isn’t Eden makes psychodynamic theory vivid and accessible to students, teachers, clinicians, and anyone curious about how therapists work and think.

A provocative new interpretation of the Adam and Eve story from an expert in Biblical literature. The Garden of Eden story, one of the most famous narratives in Western history, is typically read as an ancient account of original sin and humanity’s fall from divine grace. In this highly innovative study, Ziony Zevit argues that this is not how ancient Israelites understood the early biblical text. Drawing on such diverse disciplines as biblical studies, geography, archaeology, mythology, anthropology, biology, poetics, law, linguistics, and literary theory, he clarifies the worldview of the ancient Israelite readers during the First Temple period and elucidates what the story likely meant in its original context. Most provocatively, he contends that our ideas about original sin are based upon misconceptions originating in the Second Temple period under the influence of Hellenism. He shows how, for ancient Israelites, the story was really about how humans achieved ethical discernment. He argues further that Adam was not made from dust and that Eve was not made from Adam’s rib. His study unsettles much of what has been taken for granted about the story for more than two millennia—and has far-reaching implications for both literary and theological interpreters. “Classical Hebrew in the hands of Ziony Zevit is like a cello in the hands of a master cellist. He knows all the hidden subtleties of the instrument, and he makes you hear them in this rendition of the profoundly simple story of Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and their Creator in the Garden of Eden. Zevit brings a great deal of other biblical learning to bear in a surprisingly light-hearted book.”―Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

In the tradition of The Boys of Summer and The Bronx Is Burning, New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton delivers a fascinating look at the 1970s New York Knicks—part autobiography, part sports history, part epic, set against the tumultuous era when Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, and Bill Bradley reigned supreme in the world of basketball. Perfect for readers of Jeff Pearlman’s The Bad Guys Won!, Peter Richmond’s Badasses, and Pat Williams’s Coach Wooden, Araton’s revealing story of the Knicks’ heyday is far more than a review of one of basketball’s greatest teams’ inspiring story—it is, at heart, a stirring recreation of a time and place when the NBA championships defined the national dream.

"Though an old man," Thomas Jefferson wrote at Monticello, "I am but a young gardener." Every gardener is. In Gardening in Eden, we enter Arthur Vanderbilt's small enchanted world of the garden, where the old wooden trestle tables of a roadside nursery are covered in crazy quilts of spring color, where a catbird comes to eat raisins from one's hand, and a chipmunk demands a daily ration of salted cocktail nuts. We feel the oppressiveness of endless winter days, the magic of an old-fashioned snow day, the heady, healing qualities of wandering through a greenhouse on a frozen February afternoon, the restlessness of a gardener waiting for spring. With a sense of wonder and humor on each page, Arthur Vanderbilt takes us along with him to discover that for those who wait, watch, and labor in the garden, it's all happening right outside our windows.

A “certainly weird . . . strangely wonderful . . . [and] often irresistible” search to find the real Garden of Eden (The New York Times Book Review). Where, precisely, was God’s Paradise? St. Augustine had a theory. So did medieval monks, John Calvin and Christopher Columbus. But when Darwin’s theory of evolution changed our understanding of human origins, shouldn’t the desire to put a literal Eden on the map have faded away? Not so fast. This “gloriously researched, pluckily written historical and anecdotal assay of humankind’s age-old quixotic quest for the exact location of the Biblical garden” (Elle) explores an obsession that has consumed scientists and theologians alike for centuries. To this day, the search continues, taken up by amateur explorers, clergymen, scholars, engineers and educators—romantic seekers all who started with the same simple-sounding Bible verses, only to end up at a different spot on the globe: Sri Lanka, the Seychelles, the North Pole, Mesopotamia, China, Iraq—and Ohio. Inspired by an Eden seeker in her own family, “Wilensky-Lanford approaches her subjects with respect, enthusiasm and conscientious research” (San Francisco Chronicle) as she traverses a century-spanning history provoking surprising insights into where we came from, what we did wrong, and where we go from here. And it all makes for “a lively journey” (Kirkus Reviews).

Before the snake, the apple, and the Ten Commandments, God created a garden… “Spiritual environmentalism” did not start out as an oxymoron–it was an invitation. Yet today, many believe God’s first job description for humankind has been replaced by other “worthier pursuits”. Why has this simple instruction become so controversial? How does one sort through all the mixed messages? Is changing our lives to save the world really our responsibility–or even possible? Gardening Eden invites you to consider a new, spiritual perspective to practical environmentalism. The question is not whether our souls find expression and inspiration in our incredible planet, but how best to preserve that fundamental connection. Green living is no longer a fad–simple lifestyle solutions are now available to everyone. Discover creation care as an act of worship and a call to deeper harmony with our Creator, our fellow gardeners, and our living Earth. Gardening Eden is the primer in how this shift will transform not only our world, but your very soul.

Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction A New York Times Editors' Choice Selection The untold story of Hamilton’s—and Burr’s—personal physician, whose dream to build America’s first botanical garden inspired the young Republic. On a clear morning in July 1804, Alexander Hamilton stepped onto a boat at the edge of the Hudson River. He was bound for a New Jersey dueling ground to settle his bitter dispute with Aaron Burr. Hamilton took just two men with him: his “second” for the duel, and Dr. David Hosack. As historian Victoria Johnson reveals in her groundbreaking biography, Hosack was one of the few points the duelists did agree on. Summoned that morning because of his role as the beloved Hamilton family doctor, he was also a close friend of Burr. A brilliant surgeon and a world-class botanist, Hosack—who until now has been lost in the fog of history—was a pioneering thinker who shaped a young nation. Born in New York City, he was educated in Europe and returned to America inspired by his newfound knowledge. He assembled a plant collection so spectacular and diverse that it amazes botanists today, conducted some of the first pharmaceutical research in the United States, and introduced new surgeries to America. His tireless work championing public health and science earned him national fame and praise from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander von Humboldt, and the Marquis de Lafayette. One goal drove Hosack above all others: to build the Republic’s first botanical garden. Despite innumerable obstacles and near-constant resistance, Hosack triumphed when, by 1810, his Elgin Botanic Garden at last crowned twenty acres of Manhattan farmland. “Where others saw real estate and power, Hosack saw the landscape as a pharmacopoeia able to bring medicine into the modern age” (Eric W. Sanderson, author of Mannahatta). Today what remains of America’s first botanical garden lies in the heart of midtown, buried beneath Rockefeller Center. Whether collecting specimens along the banks of the Hudson River, lecturing before a class of rapt medical students, or breaking the fever of a young Philip Hamilton, David Hosack was an American visionary who has been too long forgotten. Alongside other towering figures of the post-Revolutionary generation, he took the reins of a nation. In unearthing the dramatic story of his life, Johnson offers a lush depiction of the man who gave a new voice to the powers and perils of nature.