What We Are Reading Today: Good Girls by Hadley Freeman

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Updated 23 April 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: Good Girls by Hadley Freeman

Hadley Freeman’s “Good Girls” is an excellent memoir cum personal investigation into anorexia. 

The author was hospitalised with anorexia when she was 13 years old, and then struggled with the illness for the next 20 years of her life. 

This book chronicles her own personal experiences whilst interweaving discussions she has had with doctors and professors into the narrative, as well as conversations with those fellow patients who she met in hospital as a teenager.

Freeman is an intelligent, articulate and insightful writer and this memoir discussing her experiences of growing up with anorexia is compelling and fascinating, said a review on Goodreads.com.

“This book was really good but also heartbreaking all at the same time,” it added.

There is an enormous amount of personal revelation, both to the author herself and to us, about the dynamics of anorexia.

There is a great deal of research information combined with true stories.

Anorexia “is not a desire to be thin — it’s a desire to look ill,” Freeman writes.


What We Are Reading Today: Freedom from Fear by Alan Kahan

Updated 27 February 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: Freedom from Fear by Alan Kahan

“Freedom from Fear” offers a striking new account of the dominant political and social theory of our time: liberalism. In a pathbreaking reframing of the historical debate, Alan Kahan charts the development of Western liberalism from the late eighteenth century to the present. 

Examining key liberal thinkers and issues, Kahan shows how liberalism is both a response to fear and a source of hope: the search for a world in which no one need be afraid.

“Freedom from Fear” reveals how liberal arguments typically rely on three pillars: freedom, markets, and morals. 

But when liberals ignore one or more of these pillars, their arguments generally fail to persuade.