Disoriented: Embodied Life in Strange Times

This book validates the reasonable sense readers might have that daily life has gotten strange. Howard focuses not on conspicuous crises that fill news cycles, like wars or elections, but the texture of everyday life where it may be hard to pinpoint what seems off. This book helps readers name ways that manners have become weird--keto diets alongside food porn, influencer as dream job, rehearsal dinners that come after weddings--and follows this disquiet into areas where people do some of their most important living. Chapters consider what we eat and what schools teach children, how we work, find love, raise families, and live faithfully. Pairing observation and explanation, Howard sets changes in historical context, American and her own, to help liberate readers from the tyranny of the present. Understanding how things got to be the way they are offers an antidote to current disquiet and preserves wonder at the good of embodied life.

Agnes R. Howard teaches history and humanities at Christ College, the Honors College of Valparaiso University, in Valparaiso, Indiana. She is author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us About Being Human (2020).