Good Night Thoughts

Music and Mind

A compelling and growing body of research has shown music and arts therapies to be effective tools for addressing a widening array of conditions, from providing pain relief and alleviating anxiety and depression to regaining speech after stroke or traumatic brain injury, and improving mobility for people with disorders that include Parkinson’s disease and MS.

In Music and Mind Renée Fleming draws upon her own experience as an advocate to showcase the breadth of this booming field, inviting leading experts to share their discoveries. In addition to describing therapeutic benefits, the book explores evolution, brain function, childhood development, and technology as applied to arts and health.

Much of this area of study is relatively new, made possible by recent advances in brain imaging, and supported by the National Institutes of Health, major hospitals, and universities. This work is sparking an explosion of public interest in the arts and health sector.

Fleming has presented on this material in over fifty cities across North America, Europe, and Asia, collaborating with leading researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners. With essays from notable musicians, writers, and artists, as well as leading neuroscientists, Music and Mind is a groundbreaking book, the perfect introduction and overview of this exciting new field.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • Learning to Disagree Better by John Inazu

    Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect by John Inazu As a constitutional scholar, legal expert, and former litigator, John has spent his career learning how to disagree well with other people. In Learning to Disagree, John shares memorable stories and draws on the practices that legal training imparts–seeing the complexity in every issue and inhabiting the mindset of an opposing point of view–to help us handle daily encounters and lifelong relationships with those who see life very differently than we do.This groundbreaking, poignant, and highly practical book equips us to:
    • Understand what holds us back from healthy disagreement
    • Learn specific, start-today strategies for dialoguing clearly and authentically
    • Move from stuck, broken disagreements to mature, healthy disagreements
    • Cultivate empathy as a core skill for our personal lives and our whole society
    If you are feeling exhausted from the tattered state of dialogue in your social media feed, around the country, and in daily conversations, you’re not alone. Discover a more connected life while still maintaining the strength of your convictions through this unique, often-humorous, thought-provoking, and ultimately life-changing exploration of the best way to disagree.

    Read More about "Learning to Disagree"...

  • Readers were first introduced to the considerable talents of Lisa Ko with the release of her “masterful” (Redbook) and “ambitious” (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel, The Leavers. Named a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver to receive the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, The Leavers catapulted Ko into the literary stratosphere, highlighting the powerful ways in which her “achingly beautiful” prose (The Christian Science Monitor) and “unforgettable narrative voice” (NYLON) “mirror America’s own urgent and timely political landscape” (W magazine).

    Read More about "Memory Piece"...

  • England, 1840. Two decades after the death of her beloved sister, Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury and the home of her family friends, the Fowles. In a dusty corner of the vicarage, there is a cache of Jane’s letters that Cassandra is desperate to find. Dodging her hostess and a meddlesome housemaid, Cassandra eventually hunts down the letters and confronts the secrets they hold, secrets not only about Jane but about Cassandra herself.

    Read More about "Miss Austen"...

  • Retired publisher Susan Ryeland is living the good life. She is running a small hotel on a Greek island with her long-term boyfriend Andreas. It should be everything she's always wanted. But is it? She's exhausted with the responsibilities of making everything work on an island where nothing ever does, and truth be told she's beginning to miss London.

    Read More about "Moonflower Murders: A Novel, Magpie Murders: A Novel"...