The Double Bind

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of The Flight Attendant, here is a gripping psychological novel of obsession and consequence. When Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont’s back roads, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography, spending all her free time at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that he won’t let anyone see. When Bobbie dies, Laurel discovers a deeply hidden secret–a story that leads her far from her old life, and into a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers who claim they want to save her. In a tale that travels between the Roaring Twenties and the twenty-first century, between Jay Gatsby’s Long Island and rural New England, bestselling author Chris Bohjalian has written an extraordinary novel. Look for Chris Bohjalian's new novel, The Lioness!

A breakthrough account of how women can overcome the social binds that block their success. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson explores society's interlaced traps and restrictions, she draws on hundreds of interviews with women from all walks of life to show the ways they can cut through the restrictions.

“Bold, absorbing, insightful, and wise. . . . Read it: the truth is inside.”— Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things “A work of courage and ferocious honesty” (Diana Abu-Jaber), Double Bind could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word “feminism,” the word “ambition” remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of “nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox” (O, The Oprah Magazine) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all. “Both intimate and scalable” (Atlantic.com), Double Bind finally seizes “ambition” from the roster of dirty words.

FOR DISTRIBUTION OUTSIDE THE USA. Rodney Cooper, National Director of Education for Promise Keepers, identifies the no-win 'double binds' of our culture and helps men escape them and find true freedom in Christ.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson has been called a lost giant of twentieth-century thought. In the years following World War II, Bateson was among the group of mathematicians, engineers, and social scientists who laid the theoretical foundations of the information age. In Palo Alto in 1956, he introduced the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. By the sixties, he was in Hawaii studying dolphin communication. Bateson's discipline hopping made established experts wary, but he found an audience open to his ideas in a generation of rebellious youth. To a gathering of counterculturalists and revolutionaries in 1967 London, Bateson was the first to warn of a "greenhouse effect" that could lead to runaway climate change. Blending intellectual biography with an ambitious reappraisal of the 1960s, Anthony Chaney uses Bateson's life and work to explore the idea that a postmodern ecological consciousness is the true legacy of the decade. Surrounded by voices calling for liberation of all kinds, Bateson spoke of limitation and dependence. But he also offered an affirming new picture of human beings and their place in the world—as ecologies knit together in a fabric of meaning that, said Bateson, "we might as well call Mind."

"In a period of right wing attacks on Muslims - or people thought to be Muslims - how does one respond to human rights violations by the Muslim Right without feeding hate campaigns? When US diplomats invoke the oppression of Muslim women to sanctify war, how do we practice feminist solidarity without strengthening Orientalism and neocolonialism? When the US targets jihadis for assassination by drone, should human rights defenders worry about violations perpetrated by those same jihadis or focus on violations by the state? These are some of the questions raised in Double Bind: the Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights ... Taking the UK organization Cageprisoners as an example, it shows how to distinguish between organizations that stand for universal and inseparable human rights, and those that use the language of human rights for other purposes. It discusses "five wrong ideas about the Muslim Right" : that it is anti-imperialist; that "defence of Muslim lands" is comparable to national liberation struggles; that the problem is "Islamphobia"; that terrorism is justified by revolutionary necessity; and that any feminist who criticises the Muslim Right is an Orientalist ally of US imperialism."--Publisher description.

Using a rich array of ethnographic and archival data closely considering the Irish and the manner in which ‘Irishness’ was rendered inclusive, Multiculturalism's Double Bind demonstrates that multiculturalism can encourage cross-community political engagement in the global city. This book challenges the perceived wisdom that multiculturalism counteracts the opportunity for groups to move beyond their particularized constituency to build links and networks with other 'minority' groups. Theoretically informed and empirically grounded this volume will appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines, including migration and ethnicity, social and cultural anthropology, Irish studies and sociology.