A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.
A British psychoanalyst examines the “essential and far-reaching ambiguity of a simple idea.”
Phillips, author of Unforbidden Pleasures, Becoming Freud, and Attention Seeking, premises his latest book on the notion that giving something up—or giving up on something—is based on beliefs about change. “We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we can’t,” he writes. Underlying that assumption is that life itself is always worth living, an assumption many are questioning at a time when the planet is in dire social, political, and ecological crisis. Turning to writers and thinkers like Kafka for illumination, Phillips suggests the two-sided nature of giving up: “defeatedness and sacrifice, or failure and compromise, or weakness and realism.” At the same time, he also suggests what few discuss. In giving up, humans can take “sadistic pleasure” in such possibilities as suicide, what Camus would call the most “serious” of all philosophical problems. Yet most will choose to carry on, which leads Phillips to ask, “What is worth surviving for?” Darwin would suggest that survival itself is the endgame, while Freud would suggest that it is pleasure. Yet Phillips finds these “answers” to be as reductive as they are problematic. He offers a partial “answer” of his own by building on Freud’s ideas about loss, which is itself at the heart of all forms of giving up. Loss—being forced to reckon with it—is perhaps a catalyst needed to spur both transformation and inventiveness, which is perhaps the one great hope that remains for humankind. Some readers may find the author’s tendency to speak in high-culture abstractions not to their taste. However, those who enjoy heady engagement with ideas from the upper registers of literature, philosophy, and psychology will undoubtedly find this book exhilarating.
A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780374614140
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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