Author News: A Grace Given in Sorrow – Stories as Soulcraft with Edward Cooke

This was originally posted on the Transmundane Press blog for the anthology “After the Happily Ever After”, published December 2016

Bruno Bettelheim has had a bad press. He’s been pilloried for extending the influence of nurture much further than we’re comfortable with. He was even so unfashionable as to believe we could all be nurtured by exposure to stories. In The Uses of Enchantment he puts it like this:

“Explaining to a child why a fairy tale is so captivating… destroys… the story’s enchantment. Adult interpretations rob the child of the opportunity… through repeated hearing and ruminating about the story, to cope successfully with a difficult situation. We grow, we find meaning in life and security in ourselves, by having understood and solved personal problems on our own, not by having them explained to us by others.”

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The Limits To Travel – David Metz

Alongside Barry Hutton’s excellent “Planning Sustainable Transport” (also by Routledge), this is in the small but important list of “books which changed how I think about transport” and worth reading several times over. The author, David Metz, has spent his career at the Department for Transport and in various academic research positions, so he is able to explain authoritatively what good transport policy looks like.