Böcker av Ellen Wayland-Smith

“Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder.”—Ada LimónIn this luminous collection of essays, Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve. For it is in such liminal states—losing a parent, giving birth, experiencing a nervous breakdown, coping with breast cancer—that we, too, are part of “the cosmic molecular arc that binds all life.”From the Old Testament to Maggie Nelson, these explorations are grounded in a rich network of associations. In an essay on the postpartum body, Wayland-Smith interweaves her experience as a mother with accounts of phantom limbs and Greek mythology to meditate on moments when pieces of our being exist outside our bodies. In order to comprehend diagnoses of depression and breast cancer, she delves into LA hippie culture’s love affair with crystals and Emily Dickinson’s geological poetry. Her experience with chemotherapy leads to reflection on Western medicine and its intolerance of death and the healing capacity of nature. And throughout, she challenges the false separation between the human and the “primeval, animal mode of being.”At once intimate and expansive, The Science of Last Things peels back layers of human thought and behavior, breaking down our modern conceptions of individuality and reframing us as participants in a world of astounding elegance and mystery.

The postwar American advertising agency was an unusually powerful institution. Ads and the desires they articulated (or created) played outsized roles in shaping a new suburban order and the gender relations it embodied. Jean Wade Rindlaub, a pathbreaking and strong but perhaps alienated woman, made her name on ad campaigns for Chiquita and other companies that ironically encouraged other women to stay in the kitchen. Ellen Wayland-Smith will use Rindlaub's story as a framework for a cultural history of how women's desires were codified and packaged by the postwar advertising industry--and how they came to have unexpected geopolitical impact.