Mavis Himes
Bowman & Littlefield
“MOST OF us take our names for granted,” writes Mavis Himes in the prologue to her intriguing new book about names and the practice of naming people. “Yet our first name – both an introduction and a greeting – is one of the first words we learn.” Himes, a practising psychotherapist in Toronto, and author of the memoir The Sacred Body: A Therapist’s Journey, parlays her fascination with names, and what they tell the world (and ourselves) about identity, heritage, and personhood, into an interdisciplinary investigation of the ways in which names are chosen, adopted, changed, and embraced, and all the reasons why.