Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

This book provides a compelling explanation of the value of tears as a needed expression of emotion for personal and societal transformation. Community educator, activist, and minister Perry crafts a selective multidisciplinary survey of weeping, woven with his own lived experience of learning to embrace tears as an embodiment of emotion and a fundamental aspect of individual and collective well-being. Depicting himself as an "evangelist for crying," Perry recounts his decision to learn the art of shedding tears. Opening chapters explore the physiological basis for crying. Perry summarizes key works in chapter 2, beginning with Darwin's The Emotional Expression of Man and Animals and tracing selected studies through the present. Readers will benefit from the cited science of this chapter, as well as the breadth of disciplines and their treatment of grief covered in subsequent chapters. Considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality figure strongly in Perry's exploration. While he cites numerous causes of modern ills that engender tears, and that push some to suppress them, he also includes numerous stories and citations of personal experiences where the expression of tears transformed both the one crying and those observing the crier. "Cry like your tears matter, because they do," Perry advises, concluding a book that makes the case well.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.