Marina Benjamin

Marina Benjamin's Insomnia is part memoir and part philosophical inquiry. An intense and lyrical personal narrative into a condition that is on the rise, it treats insomnia as an experience, not a disorder, drawing on its influences on the arts and sciences throughout history, as well as on Benjamin's own life.

Insomnia

The History of a Family, the Story of a Nation

Last Days in Babylon

How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond

Rocket Dreams 

Marina Benjamin grew up in London feeling estranged from her family's exotic Middle Eastern ways. She refused to speak the Arabic her mother and grandmother spoke at home. She rejected the peculiar food they ate in favor of hamburgers and beer. But when Benjamin had her own child a few years ago, she realized that she was losing her link to the past. In Last Days in Babylon, Benjamin delves into the story of her family's life among the Jews of Iraq in the first half of the twentieth century. When Iraq gained independence in 1932, Jews were the largest and most prosperous ethnic group in Baghdad. They dominated trade and finance, hobnobbed with Iraqi dignitaries, and lived in grandiose villas on the banks of the Tigris. Just twenty years later the community had been utterly ravaged, its members effectively expelled from the country by a hostile Iraqi government. Benjamin's grandmother Regina Sehayek lived through it all. Born in 1905, when Baghdad was still under Ottoman control, her childhood was a virtual idyll. This privileged existence was barely touched when the British marched into Iraq. But with the rise of Arab nationalism and the first stirrings of anti-Zionism, Regina, then a young mother, began to have dark premonitions of what was to come. By the time Iraq was galvanized by war, revolution, and regicide, Regina was already gone, her hair-raising escape a tragic exodus from a land she loved -- and a permanent departure from the husband whose gentle guiding hand had made her the woman she was. Benjamin's keen ear and fluid writing bring to life Regina's Baghdad, both good and bad. More than a stirring story of survival, Last Days in Babylon is a bittersweet portrait of Old World Baghdad and its colorful Jewish community, whose roots predate the birth of Islam by a thousand years and whose culture did much to make Iraq the peaceful desert paradise that has since become a distant memory. In 2004 Benjamin visited Baghdad for the first time, searching for the remains of its once vital Jewish community. What she discovered will haunt anyone who seeks to understand a country that continues to command the world's attention, just as it did when Regina Sehayek proudly walked through Baghdad's streets. By turns moving and funny, Last Days in Babylon is an adventure story, a riveting history, and a timely reminder that behind today's headlines are real people whose lives are caught -- too often tragically -- in the crossfire of misunderstanding, age-old prejudice, and geopolitical ambition.

In a society obsessed with living longer and looking younger, what does middle age nowadays mean? How should a fifty-something be in a world ceaselessly redefining ageing, youth, and experience? The Middlepause offers hope, and heart. Cutting through society’s clamorous demands to work longer and stay young, it delivers a clear-eyed account of midlife’s challenges. Spurred by her own brutal propulsion into menopause, Marina Benjamin weighs the losses, joys and opportunities of our middle years, taking inspiration from literature and philosophical example. She uncovers the secret misogynistic history of HRT, and tells us why a dose of Jung is better than a trip to the gym. Attending to ageing parents, the shock of bereavement, parenting a teenager, and her own health woes, she emerges into a new definition of herself as daughter, mother, citizen and woman. Marina Benjamin suggests there’s comfort and guidance in memory, milestones and margins, and offers an inspired and expanded vision of how to be middle-aged happily and harmoniously, without sentiment or delusion, making The Middlepause a companion, and a friend. PRAISE FOR MARINA BENJAMIN ‘Lucid and sophisticated … A restrained but wonderful guide to the convulsive changes of 50 and over … This is a book that yields valuable insights on almost every page.’ The Guardian ‘Benjamin has conjured something philosophically poised and poetic from an unlikely subject, as much about the sanctuary of place and coming to terms with time, seasons and life’s cycles, and all rendered with clarity and calm.’ The Saturday Age

on turning fifty

The Middlepause

Jag önskar inte längre det jag brukade önska. Så skriver Marina Benjamin i sin lågmälda men intensiva genomlysning av vad det innebär att bli femtio i en kultur som hyllar ungdomen och uppmanar kvinnor att dölja och förneka åldrandet. För hennes del gick det väldigt fort. Vid 49 års ålder genomgick hon en livmoderoperation, vilket bokstavligen kastade henne in i klimakteriet. Håret blev torrt, hyn grå, hon vandrade sömnlös på nätterna. Det här är en bok för alla som vill spy på självhjälpsböcker med käcka tillrop om att livet börjar vid femtio. Den ser på åldrandet med klarsyn och inte utan sorg, men med en stark vilja att utforska alla aspekter av det. Vad händer med förhållandet till en ännu äldre mor? Vad händer när en dotter börjar bli vuxen? Bland vännerna, som blir ännu viktigare, utspelar sig en tragedi. En av dem drabbas av en aggressiv cancer och går bort, dryga femtio år fyllda. Jämfört med henne har författaren ändå en framtid, vilket drabbar henne med starka känslor av skuld. Mellantid är indelad i kapitel med rubriker som Hud, Ryggrad, Muskler och Inälvor, men det är en bok som når så mycket längre än att beskriva det kroppsliga åldrandet. Det är en bok om livet. Om den del vi helst inte pratar om. Marina Benjamin är brittisk författare och journalist. Hon har arbetat som kulturjournalist på tidskriften New Statesman och tidningen Evening Standard, och har givit ut fyra böcker, bland annat Last Days in Babylon, en berättelse i romanform om hennes mormor som föddes i Bagdad. Översättare: Emeli André.

Mellantid

Draws on the experiences of the author's own family to chronicle the odyssey and ultimate exile of Jewish Iraqis, documenting how Jewish citizens in Baghdad deteriorated from the region's largest and most prosperous ethnic group to a band of a few dozen survivors under the oppression of a hostile Iraqi government. By the author of Rocket Dreams. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The Exile of Iraq's Jews, the Story of My Family

Living at the End of the World

"The Middlepauseoffers hope, and heart. Cutting through society's clamorous demands to work longer and stay young, it delivers a clear-eyed account of midlife's challenges. Spurred by her own brutal propulsion into menopause, Marina Benjamin weighs the losses, joys and opportunities of our middle years, taking inspiration from literature and philosophical example. She uncovers the secret misogynistic history of HRT, and tells us why a dose of Jung is better than a trip to the gym. Attending to ageing parents, the shock of bereavement, parenting a teenager, and her own health woes, she emerges into a new definition of herself as daughter, mother, citizen and woman. Marina Benjamin suggests there's comfort and guidance in memory, milestones and margins, and offers an inspired and expanded vision of how to be middle-aged happily and harmoniously, without sentiment or delusion, making The Middlepausea companion, and a friend."

On Turning Fifty The

Middlepause

"In The Middlepause Benjamin deftly and brilliantly examines the losses and unexpected gains she experienced in menopause. Menopause is a mind and body shift as monumental and universal as puberty, yet far less often discussed, especially in public, which is what makes Benjamin's work here so urgently necessary." —Kate Tuttle, The Los Angeles Times The Middlepause offers a vision of contentment in middle age, without sentiment or delusion. Marina Benjamin weighs the losses and opportunities of our middle years, taking inspiration from literature, science, philosophy, and her own experience. Spurred by her surgical propulsion into a sudden menopause, she finds ways to move forward while maintaining clear–eyed acknowledgment of the challenges of aging. Attending to complicated elderly parents and a teenaged daughter, experiencing bereavement, her own health woes, and a fresh impetus to give, Benjamin emerges into a new definition of herself as daughter, mother, citizen, and woman. Among The Middlepause's many wise observations about no longer being young: ""I am discovering that I care less about what other people think."" ""My needs are leaner and my storehouse fuller."" ""It is not possible to fully appreciate what it means to age without attending to what the body knows. . . . I have always had a knee–jerk distaste for the idea that age is all in the mind."" ""You need a cohort of peers to go through the aging process with you. A cackle of crones! A cavalry!"" Marina Benjamin's memoir will serve as a comfort, a companion to women going through the too–seldom–spoken of physical and mental changes in middle age and beyond.

On Life After Youth

In 1958, mankind's centuries-long flirtation with space flight became a torrid love affair. For a decade, tens of millions of people were enraptured -- first, by the U.S.-Soviet race to the moon, and finally, as America outstripped its rival, by Project Apollo alone. It is now more than three decades since the last man walked on the moon...more time than between the first moonwalk and the beginning of World War II. Apollo did not, as had been promised by a generation of visionaries, herald the beginning of the Space Age, but its end. Or did it? Project Apollo, like a cannonball, reached its apogee and returned to earth, but the trajectory of that return was complex. America's atmosphere -- its economic, scientific, and cultural atmosphere -- made for a very complicated reentry that produced many solutions to the trajectory problem. Rocket Dreams is about those solutions...about the places where the space program landed. In Rocket Dreams, an extraordinarily talented young writer named Marina Benjamin will take you on a journey to those landing sites. A visit with retired astronauts at a celebrity autograph show is a starting point down the divergent paths taken by the pioneers, including Edgar Mitchell, founder of the "church" of Noëtic Sciences. Roswell, New Mexico is a landing site of a different order, the "magnetic north" of UFO belief in the United States -- a belief that began its most dramatic growth precisely at the time that the path of the space program began its descent. In the vernacular, the third law of motion states that what goes up, must come down. Thus the tremendous motive force that energized the space program didn't just vanish; it was conserved and transformed, making bestsellers out of fantasy literature, spawning Gaia, and giving symbolism to the environmental movement. Everything from the pop cultural boom in ufology to the worldwide Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) feeds on the energy given off by America's leap toward space. Rocket Dreams is an eloquent tour of this Apollo-scarred landscape. It is also an introduction to some of the most fascinating characters imaginable: Some long dead, like the crackpot visionary Alfred Lawson, who saw in space flight a new stage of human evolution ("Alti-Man"), or Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, whose workshop in Roswell stands only half a mile from shops selling posters of alien visitors. Others are very much alive -- like Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and partner with Gerard O'Neill in the drive to build free-floating space colonies, and SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, who has spent decades listening to the skies, hoping for the first contact with another intelligent species. Perceptive, original, and wonderfully written, informed by history, science, and an acute knowledge of popular culture, Rocket Dreams is a brilliant book by a remarkable talent.

Rocket Dreams

In a society obsessed with living longer and looking younger, what does middle age mean today? Spurred by her own brutal propulsion into menopause, Marina Benjamin's clear-eyed account of our middle years takes inspiration from literature and philosophy to weigh the challenges and opportunities of mid-life. It offers an inspired and expanded vision of how to be middle-aged happily and harmoniously, without sentiment or delusion.

The fascinating story of the Iraqi Jews told through the life of the author's grandmother.

Marina Benjamin

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