We are exhausted. We are overwhelmed. Worse, we are numb.

No matter what screen you’re getting your news and information from, the barrage is constant, horrific and always urgent: Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, climate change, ecological devastation, economic collapse, AI, toxic social media…and of course Donald Trump and all he represents.

Authoritarian leaders and genocidal regimes have always found numbness a desirable goal, as it narrows the possibilities for revolt. Shocked and awed into submission, we are at the mercy of tyrants, like captive animals in a zoo. What we see in zoo animals today may be a ghostly image of ourselves. In this lucid, trenchant book, Mark Abley explores the idea of numbness in today’s political context.

Credit John Kenney

Mark Abley is a nonfiction writer, journalist, editor and poet. His most recent books are Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail and an updated edition of the ground-breaking Conversations with a Dead Man: Indigenous Rights and the Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. One of his earlier books, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal; it has been translated into French, Spanish, Japanese and Latvian. A long-time Montrealer, Abley now lives in Gananoque, Ontario.

REVIEWS AND PRAISE OF PREVIOUS TITLES

“Spoken Here is a splendid, original work, written with a combination of the scholarly and the personal, the anecdotal and the researched, in voices that celebrate words and create pictures…. Abley’s point, persuasively and vibrantly made, is that we are all weakened by threads dropped from the tapestry of international languages and cultures.” — The Globe and Mail

“Gracefully written, funny and frequently heartbreaking.”— New York Times Book Review

“Gorgeous and lyrical … Strange Bewildering Time is … a meditation on the nature of memory, time and self-knowledge, as well as an account of a region on the brink of turmoil … There is poetry on every page.” Montreal Review of Books

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