Read For Your Self

Literature, Biology and

the Construction of Identity

by

Dr. Joseph Gold

 

Read for Your Self is a controversial and lively exploration of the place and meaning of literature in our personal and social lives. Joseph Gold pushes beyond the "reading as crisis management" model and proves reading is essential to our daily struggle to stay healthy, happy and effective. Gold shows that reading literature is not a passive exercise, but a coping mechanism leading toward a permanent process of health management, greater self-expression, freedom, independence and social responsibility.

Read for Your Self also explores the biological implications of reading and demonstrates that fiction is crucial to physiological well-being. It is essential to brain development and formation, and conditions the way in which we interpret ourselves and the world around us. Indeed, Gold argues that novels are less works of art than models for shaping, understanding, and expressing ourselves.

A highly charged and very accessible testament to the power of reading that will challenge the conventional notion of what a good story really is.

Also coming in a new quality paperback edition:

Read for Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System, combining bibliotherapy with an almost encyclopedic range of popular and scholarly literature. Includes sections on reading for children, adolescents and the elderly, as well as reading during times of crisis, such as bereavement, divorce, and aging; reading for women, for those with disabilities and for racial minorities.

Read for Your Life; 1-55041-625-1; $17.95

Read for Your Self; 1-55041-603-0; $26.95

 

Fitzhenry & Whiteside Publishers, Markham, Ontario
Tel: 1-800-387-9776/Fax: 1-800-260-9777
e-mail: [email protected]