Book Reviews

About the author:

Dr. Tian Dayton is a clinical psychologist, teacher and writer. Dr. Dayton taught psychodrama, sociometery and group psychology in the Drama Therapy Department of New York University for eight years. A regular guest on radio and TV, she has authored a number of books in the field, including The Drama Within, Forgiving and Moving On, Trauma and Addiction and Heartwounds.  Dr. Dayton lives in New York City, where she has a private practice and runs training groups.

http://www.tiandayton.com

Notes on the book:

Emotional Sobriety is about finding and maintaining our emotional equilibrium, our feeling rheostat, the one that helps us to adjust to the intensity of our emotional responses to life.

Emotional sobriety is tied up in our ability to self regulate on both a mind and body level, to bring ourselves into balance when we fall out of it. Issues with excessive self medication–food, alcohol, drugs or complusive approaches to activities like sex, work or spending–tend to reflect a lack of ability to comfortably self regulate.

Emotions impact our thinking more than our thinking impacts our emotions. When our emotions are out of control, in other words, so is our thinking. And when we can’t bring our feeling and thinking into some sort of balance, our life and relationships show it.

In order to maintain our emotional equilibrium, we need to be able to use our thinking mind to decode and understand our feeling mind. That is, we need to feel our feelings and then use our thinking to make sense and meaning out of them.

Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, is the person who coined the term “emotional sobriety.”

“I think that many oldsters who have put our AA “booze cure” to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA, the development of much more real maturity and balance in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows and with God.”

About the author:

Andrea De Carlo is one of Italy’s most successful contemporary novelists. He has published 13 novels in Italy and his books have been translated into 21 languages. He has worked as assistant director to Italian filmmakers from Frederico Fellini to Michaelangelo Antonioni, and directed an acclaimed film adaptation of his first novel, Treno di Paana.

http://www.andreadecarlo.com/eng/bio.shtml

Notes on the book:

Sea of Truth is a sophisticated thriller set in the shadow of the Vatican.

Two brothers, Fabio and Lorenzo Telmari–one a corrupt politician, the other an impassioned writer and the novel’s hero–inherit a secret upon the death of their father, an internationally renowned virologist. At his funeral, Lorenzo is approached by a mysterious redheaded woman who asks him a single question and then disappears: “Have you ever heard of Ndiogene?”

From then on, Lorenzo’s life undergoes rapid changes involving political and religious intrigue, narrow escapes, and a life-altering love affair. He learns that at the time of his death his father had two documents written by Ndiogene, a Senegalese cardinal who had recently died of AIDS. These documents contain slander against the Catholic church, and controversial opinions about population control and other issues.